By Jim Rossignol on October 4th, 2011 at 1:35 pm.
Okay then! My rambling foray into PC hardware continues. Later in the week I am going to do another PC-build post with a better, clearer version of what we discussed here. That’ll also contain some suggestions about cheaper builds and also some suggestions for what to do if you can’t/won’t build your own machine. In the meantime, however, I want to hear some opinions on the topic of gaming laptops. I tend to cart around various categories of netbook these days, with no real intention of gaming on them, even if they can actually muster a fair bit of PC gaming’s history. But I am aware than many people do having laptops with considerable more oomph. What I want to hear about is your feedback on laptops that you use for gaming. What are the specs? What was the cost? How happy are you with it? Any niggles? Would you recommend it?
Speak!
04/10/2011 at 13:40 Omroth says:
I went to boarding school so I’ve always used Dell’s desktop replacements, starting with an Inspiron 8000, all the way through the XPS range, and now I have an Alienware m18x. I’m hugely happy with the m18x – the keyboard is superb and the twin 6990s are basically desktop cards. I need a laptop nowadays so I can work at the office and at home on the same computer – I’m often working 14 hours a day and I have a wife who likes me to be in the same room as her and pretend I’m watching One Tree Hill. Sure it’s overpriced, but as a business expense it’s less crazy.
04/10/2011 at 14:01 apocraphyn says:
Also got an Alienware, M17x. It was bloody expensive and it’s bloody heavy too – but since I got a job abroad and knew I was going to be moving around a lot house-wise, I wanted something portable. (That, and I wanted to spoil myself). Dual 2GB Nvidia GTX 480M graphics cards, 8GB of RAM, i7 quad core processor…yep.
Got it over a year and a half ago and it can still play most games on max settings – which is all I could ever ask for, really. Would still prefer a desktop over a laptop, but it certainly does the job.
04/10/2011 at 14:30 Sheng-ji says:
I use an m18x too, you certainly stand out, and not necessarily in a good way, and it weighs more than me, but it works smoothly and I can open it up without voiding my warranty, so I’m happy!
04/10/2011 at 15:02 Skeletor68 says:
Question to the other guys with Alienware and particularly the other M17x owner. My own M17x runs like a dream but the fan is really loud and annoys the hell out of my gf if I’m running something fairly labour intensive like Witcher 2. Have you guys had similar problems?
04/10/2011 at 15:04 Omroth says:
Skeletor, I have indeed had that problem. I’d investigate opening it up and cleaning everything out to start with. On an m17x you won’t be able to run it on integrated gfx, but you might be able to get away with changing the power plan to “low power” or whatever. Frankly with the Witcher 2 you may just have to go to a different room.
04/10/2011 at 15:37 Skeletor68 says:
@ Omroth
Thanks man, thought as much. It only seems to do it on certain games though. 30 hours of Vampire: Masquerade, not a peep. 10 minutes into Mount and Blade and the fans of doom begin to whir.
I’ve only had the laptop a few months so I wouldn’t expect dust to be too much of a problem as yet. I’ll check out that lower power setting though, thanks.
04/10/2011 at 19:15 Faxmachinen says:
* Laptops are God’s gift to gaming, at least if we were still stuck in the LAN era. Pizza + friends + gaming.
* Dell == Alienware, and they have good screens. My five year old laptop has 1 out of 1920×1200 dead pixels.
* My next laptop will be an upgraded (not by me) Sager 8170.
* SSD are all the rage, but I’m going with RAID0 and tons of RAM.
04/10/2011 at 21:35 Captchist says:
Until I got a new desktop I used to game mostly on my Dell XPS.
Pros – the screen was an absolute dream. Beautiful colors. I upgraded from the standard screen and it was well well worth the money.
Cons – Really really hot. Couldn’t use it on my lap. If I was using it on a bench the keyboard area got very warm which made it uncomfortable, and if I was using it on a very high req game the laptop would occasionally overheat the slow right down. Eventually bought a cooling pad to sit underneath it with a built in fan. Good investment but obviously not terribly practical to carry around.
I wouldn’t recommend it to be honest. The heat just made it so uncomfortable to use for long periods.
That screen though…. wow.
05/10/2011 at 12:29 Simon says:
“I’m often working 14 hours a day and I have a wife who likes me to be in the same room as her and pretend I’m watching One Tree Hill”
Damn, that comment was like looking in the mirror! Except I only have an old school XPS that mostly runs Frozen Synapse now…
04/10/2011 at 13:42 Ginger Yellow says:
An HP DM1-3100, aka the DM1z in the US. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a gaming laptop, but I did choose it on the basis of its gaming prowess relative to other netbooks. It runs on a Zacate APU and can handle stuff like Portal 2 surprisingly well on low settings. It’s way better than my old Eee901 for regular desktop use too, but the CPU isn’t up to snuff for any particularly intensive gaming. Battery life is pretty good too, even when gaming.
04/10/2011 at 13:42 Ondrej says:
I use Acer tablet-notebook hybrid to play Puzzle Quest and all sorts of casual games that support touch screens and that I have on Steam, it’s ideal for those long nights.
04/10/2011 at 13:43 Srekel says:
I have a netbook that can’t even handle the original CS…
04/10/2011 at 14:03 xavdeman says:
Same here, ASUS 1201HA. It has the same graphics chip as the iPhone 4 and iPad so it should be able to handle things like the Unreal Engine, only Intel’s driver support is abysmal. So not even scrolling inside the browser is smooth, and I can’t even run Aero. Thanks Intel for the wonderful GMA500 drivers!
04/10/2011 at 14:21 deanb says:
Eeek, the 1201HA has a decent amount of RAM, but it’s CPU is built for UMPCs. That’s not meant to go in a netbook at all.
If people are picking up netbooks check it’s an Intel Atom N-series. They’re the ones that come with GPUs. Or if you’re getting a really new (As in from 1 week ago) netbook grab one with a D2500/D2700 chip. Dual core, and the D2700 is 2.13ghz. Should be nippy enough for most things.
04/10/2011 at 14:31 xavdeman says:
http://ark.intel.com/products/35466/Intel-Atom-Processor-Z520-%28512K-Cache-1_33-GHz-533-MHz-FSB%29
The Atom Z520 isn’t terrible. It boots Windows 7, Office 2010 etc. pretty quickly and in general I have no negative feelings toward it. It’s also just 2Watt, which is great for battery. It’s just that damn GMA500 that they use in lieu of a real GPU like in Sandy Bridge etc. Due to the drivers it can’t even play 720p Youtube. There are unofficial drivers available that do a lot better, but they don’t got any power saving features etc. so it really is up to Intel and ASUS to get their act together. But yeah I mainly use it for university stuff anyway, which doesn’t require a GPU.
04/10/2011 at 15:18 Optimaximal says:
Although, no matter what chip you buy, if it’s got Atom written on it, it’ll always be a slouch… In Order processing is Intel’s preferred way of not killing batteries.
04/10/2011 at 17:30 Hodge says:
Wot deanb said. The only laptop I own is a year-old ASUS EEE 1015PN which set me back around $350. It’s obviously not going to blow a GTX580 out of the water, but I was surprised at how well it handles most stuff. I was housesitting on the weekend Portal 2 came out and I ended up playing the entire second half of the game on it.
I guess it’s another nice side-effect of the consoles stretching out the upgrade cycle. Not only are we spared spending $2000 on a high-end PC, it gives the budget stuff a chance to catch up, too.
04/10/2011 at 18:11 LionsPhil says:
Are you sure? My first-gen EeePC happily eats up UT99, and 1NSANE. (And also SMAC and Spelunky and Nethack.) That’d be a Celery 500 processor and some kind of Intel shoes for graphics. Half-Life 1 engine shouldn’t be a bother.
In fact, my old ThinkPad i1250 (useful links considered harmful by hateful comment system) running Win98 for retro excitements will do UT99, and it does it in software because that SMI LynxEM4+ GPU wouldn’t know what a polygon was if you beat it over the head with a trigonometry textbook. Back in its day I’m sure I did in fact play Half-Life on it.
The best bit though is that my new “Intel HD graphics” one can run TF2 happily enough, and Civ 4, and Flatout 2 at native res with prettyness. With battery life and without weighing a ton or burning holes through any surface it’s sat on. “Gaming laptops” are folly, I say. Offset your gaming by a few years and you can actually have a useful portable machine which also runs games.
04/10/2011 at 18:12 LionsPhil says:
(This is the worst comment system. Hours later, one of the spam-blocked attempts unblocks.)
04/10/2011 at 18:12 LionsPhil says:
(It took multiple tries and breaking it up into parts to get it through.)
04/10/2011 at 18:14 LionsPhil says:
(If I could delete this you wouldn’t be having to read it.)
04/10/2011 at 18:17 LionsPhil says:
(But somehow RPS has a comment system that would be an embarressment to turn in as a undergraduate CompSci project.)
04/10/2011 at 13:43 smallclaws says:
I use a 2010 Macbook Pro 13″ for my gaming, and have recently set up Windows 7 to run via a BootCamp partition.
If I recall correctly, it runs on a 255mb card, an Nvidia 320M. Hardly the most beefy thing ever, but it actually does the job surprisingly well, although if you own a Macbook Pro you’ll know that you need a cooling pad for gaming, unless you enjoy either burns or sweat coating your legs. Bit noisy, but it does the job – anyone playing games on an MBP would benefit from running smcfancontrol, as it monitors your temp and displays it in the bar above.
I enjoy it – I can play SC2, or Minecraft, anywhere I like in the house, and I love that flexibility. I’m sure there are some who saw “Macbook” and switched off, but let me assure you, it does the job admirably given that it’s not really built for gaming. So, specs and cost:
4GB RAM
250GB HDD (non-SSD)
3.4Ghz processor
250mb Nvidia 320M graphics card
Cost: £1000 (Yeah, yeah, but some of us bought our Macbooks for the good OS and fantastic keyboard – I value my laptop choices by how well I can type on them, as any writer probably would.)
I also use a Logitech cooling pad, a Razer Deathadder mouse and a Razer mat, which I strongly advise getting for laptop gaming – being able to have a moveable, mousemat-sized hard surface to use your mouse on is great.
04/10/2011 at 14:34 Tams80 says:
You put your laptop on your lap? You are braver man than I am (or woman, but I’m not a woman so don’t quite know how that would work out).
04/10/2011 at 16:46 lasikbear says:
Using a 2006 Macbook Pro myself, upgraded it to a whole 2 gigs of RAM which is the most it can support. It works suprisingly well with the ultrlight copy of Windows I have for it, was able to play Dragon Age fine, though when I played it again on my desktop I was shocked at how fast the game normally was.
Mostly its good for playing older or less intensive games, but its something at least. Its also very prone to overheating and hurting itself. Already melted two power cords, had two batteries die and had the logic port die as well… also the HD got corrupted at one point but that might have been my fault.
05/10/2011 at 01:12 mashakos says:
another MBP owner here.
I’m on bootcamp’ed Windows 7 99% of the time – except when I need some Terminal goodness.
Although I don’t really play games on it, I’ve tried Starcraft II (on medium) and L4D at 1080p and surprisingly it runs both games at 60fps. Switching to my desktop beast I really see the difference in SCII cut-scenes but for light L4D or Painkiller sessions it’s ideal.
I tried a variety of other games as well just out of curiosity, and noticed that my MBP performs as well as a PS3 which is not too bad on the go. The big advantage of a MBP is that the battery life lasts a lot longer than a desktop replacement (2 hours while gaming, 3.5 hours otherwise).
specs:
Core 2 Duo T9600 2.8Ghz
4GB DDR2
nvidia 9600 mobility lameness X :(
05/10/2011 at 01:41 evilhayama says:
I have a 2011 15″ Macbook Pro, dual boot with Windows 7. I’ve been quite happy with the performance, I’ve played Deus Ex:HR, Dawn of War 2, Borderlands, Witcher 2 and Street Fighter 4 with no problems. Starcraft 2 worked nicely under Mac OS.
As a bonus, when I’m playing games my cockatiel enjoys the warming desert winds emerging from the back.
05/10/2011 at 14:10 ASBO says:
I’ve got a 2011 MBP, the performance is great. But I don’t game on it because it’s got a crappy touchpad. I could plug a mouse and/or gamepad, but then I figure I might as well just use my desktop.
04/10/2011 at 13:44 TheCheese33 says:
Dell XPS 15. It has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670, 4 gigs of RAM, and an Intel Core i5 M 430 @ 2.27 GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.3 GHz.
04/10/2011 at 14:07 beloid says:
you do know that’s actually a dual core, four threads CPU
04/10/2011 at 14:33 matredvers says:
vouch for an xps 15 especially if you hang about in the dell outlet. refurbished ones are mint , no scratches pubes etc,
04/10/2011 at 20:02 Hereticus says:
Aye the XPS15 is a decent laptop – got the current gen one as I was travelling a lot for work over the past year. Opted to leave it at 1368×768 though and go for the 540M as I’ve got a desktop at home for the high res, and this way pretty much everything plays at high with a decent frame rate :) Also replaced the CD drive with an SSD and bumped the RAM to 8GB to persuade work to let me use it instead of the one I was handed out so it does the job very well.
Completely failed to appreciate it when I first got it, but I really like the onboard 3g modem, as it seems to draw less power than a dongle, and you don’t have to use the invariably terrible dongle software!
04/10/2011 at 13:45 The_Great_Skratsby says:
I’m a happy owner of an Asus G53JW-FHD, which has been my desktop replacement for almost a year now. The portability of it is grand, not being desk bound is very liberating, however it’s a computer that has to be tethered for actual genuine gaming.
Can’t complain really, lots of features, good build, not a massively groan worthy price tag, and I’m still yet to have an issue with it. Also runs games a treat for the vast majority of the part.
Otherwise there’s always that Alienware M11x if you want something genuinely portable for gaming, which compliments a desktop rather than replaces it. Or there’s that Razer mini-thingo which has had no news since its announcement for all that I know.
Oh and edited for specs:
i7 Q740, 460M 1.5gb, 12gb mem (8gb is the model standard), 1tb hdd, 15.4″ monitor, Blu Ray drive, and a variety of other bits.
04/10/2011 at 14:29 LockjawNightvision says:
I’m rocking the same. I find it runs most stuff admirably. It handled the Witcher II on high without too much stuttering, though it would choke a little when there was lots of foliage on screen, so I played most of the game with about half the settings on medium, if I recall.
04/10/2011 at 16:31 Danarchist says:
I have the Asus J73jh. It has a i7 and a 5870 with a gig of memory (non-shared). It’s a beast to lug around but not as heavy as my brothers mx17. Then again if your a grown man that doesn’t live on a diet of wheat and soy you should probably be able to lug it without much grunting.
Only thing I do not like about it is the resolution of the screen. It is sort of….dull. Not crisp. Like looking through eye glasses that have finger oil on them. I mean it’s a giant monitor, bigger than any other laptop monitor I have seen at 17.3 but it just doesnt provide the eye candy of my simple desktop monitor.
If you care about battery life on a gaming rig your either a hardware reviewer/blogger or daft.
04/10/2011 at 16:54 goliath1333 says:
I have the m11x and must say it’s great at FPS, but sadly chokes on many hard core RTS and other CPU games. They’ve patched CIV 5 to the point that it’s playable though, so it’s not totally incapable. I also was just laddering Starcraft 2 in the airport yesterday, so the portability IS awesome. Gaming netbook? hell yeah!
04/10/2011 at 17:21 Snuffy the Evil says:
I’m currently using a G53SW-XN1, which is the G53JW-FHD’s slightly slower cousin.
It has an i7-2630QM @ 2 GHz (3 GHz with ReadyBoost© or SpeedBoost© or whatever), 6 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM, a 460m with 1.5 gigabytes of video memory, and a single 500 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive, although I’m planning on getting a SSD in the near future.
It looks like a fighter jet and was exceptionally cheap compared to computers by other companies. It’s a bit on the thick & heavy side, but I really got it to be a desktop replacement for college that won’t be woefully obsolete in three years.
It really is a wonderful computer.
07/10/2011 at 10:56 CrivenS says:
Wow I have the same comp as Totalbiscuit :D
I have been nothing but overjoyed with the performance. Only one game (SC2) puts any pressure on the temperature, and keeping the body raised for airflow resolves such issues.
04/10/2011 at 13:45 trooperdx3117 says:
Since im in college i dont have any use or space for a desktop so im using my Dell Inspiron 15R, its actually surprisingly decent, intel core i3 @2.4ghz with hyper threading enabled, 3gb ram and a Amd HD radeon 5650 1gb with dx11, right now im able to play the battlefield 3 beta at high settings and everything silky smooth so im delighted!
04/10/2011 at 13:46 TotalBiscuit says:
I’ve got an Asus G73SW, mostly for video encoding while at events, but it games pretty well too. It’s nice to have the power if I’m stuck in a hotel for a week or whatever to keep up with the latest stuff. It’s got a 460 in it so it’s not too shabby as well as a 1080p capable screen, though better off gaming in 720p for performance considerations. Asus revamped it with the G74 and put a 560 in it and 16 gigs of ram (totally unnecessary). The laptop itself works well for gaming. The keyboard is full-sized and effective, though for typing it sometimes misses keypresses because of how shallow it is (the G74 fixed that problem). The machine is well cooled thanks to the big heatsinks and exhausts at the back which make the laptop bulkier but it stays cool all the time.
The machine itself has the following spec.
i7-2 2630QM
8gb RAM
Geforce 460 mobile
2x 500gb Seagate Momentus hybrid drives
So yeah, I’m pretty happy with it for gaming on the move. I tend to take a 360 pad with me so I can play stuff like Bastion on the train. It’s not exactly optimal to try and use a high -sensitivity mouse in a moving vehicle, bumps around too much. I honestly haven’t had many noteworthy problems with it at all.
04/10/2011 at 14:40 Tams80 says:
17″ on a train?! Do you travel first class?! If so I hope you don’t put it on the Cynical Brit expenses!
04/10/2011 at 17:06 Milky1985 says:
Nah he will just wear the top hat on the train, it will give him an air of authority so he can just demand the desk space from the peasants around him!
(that and I imagine hes a big scary man who you wouldn’t mess with)
04/10/2011 at 18:11 TotalBiscuit says:
Yes I travel first class and why wouldn’t I put it on expenses? It’s not as if it’s company money, I am the company, it’s my money.
04/10/2011 at 21:43 Trousers says:
I got myself an Asus G74s over the summer to replace my old Asus N61j. Its gotta be 5x quieter than my N61j was, and it never gets hot. All games I’ve tried will run at medium-max settings at 1920×1080 (The Witcher 2 pushes it pretty hard, have to disable SSAO and AA unless I lower the res). It is a lot bigger and heavier than my old one, but the whole no-heat, no-noise thing makes it worth it.
G74: i7 2630qm, Geforce 560m gtx, 12 gb ram, 17in 1920×1080, 640gb HD, $1400 :(
n61j: i7 720qm, ati 5730m, 4gb ram, 16in 1366×768, 320gb HD, $1100, sold for 900
Not smart of me to spend so much on a laptop, but I’ve never used a nicer laptop, and the upgrade in quality from the n61 (which got WAY too hot, made way too much noise, and felt way too fragile) is huge. Always had problems connecting via HDMI to my tv or monitor with the old one, probably because of the weird native resolution. The G74 works perfectly with both. Very happy with it.
04/10/2011 at 13:48 Unaco says:
Asus EEE 1215n, that I got a few months ago. It’s sort of Laptop specs, but in a Netbook package. Great battery life (7-8 hours), 2Ghz Dual Core, decent amount of storage, DX11 support (integrated video card AND dedicated NVidia GPU, so get the advantages of both), full 1080p HD Video.
It’s nothing compared to my desktop, or to some laptops, but handles the sort of games I want to play while mobile perfectly well – Frozen Synapse, Europa Universalis 3, Civ 4, AI War. It’s small, it’s light, it looks cool, it runs cool.
Only niggle… I hate trackpads. Where the hell is the middle mouse button, or the scroll wheel!?!
04/10/2011 at 13:48 yxxxx says:
My laptop is poweful enought to play games even something like bf3 runs on it prehaps not at max settings but enought to look nice.
My biggest problem apart from the touch pad which for anything other than slow paced games is useless is the heat they pump out. I sometimes like to play something while watching the tv which involves having the laptop on my lap now if i dont have something in the way the heat soon gets unbearable.
Otherwise things have come on so much with laptops that you can get a decent one for reasonable prices that will play most games with out problems
I got a samsung laptop and it has to be the best one in terms of speed price and quality i have owned.
i5 Dual Core 430M 2.26GHz
4GB ram
500GB hdd
Nvidia GeForce GT 330M 1GB
04/10/2011 at 13:48 shadowbadger says:
I use a laptop almost exclusively at the moment and have yet to find a game I cannot play on it. I’m at work at the moment and the only thing I can remember about it is that it is an Acer with a NVidia 240M card which has handled anything I’ve thrown at it so far.
My wife adn I are both doctors, we both work stupidl long hours and find having time together hard to find. However, as above with Omroth, she loves watching Greys Anatomy, X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing etc… while I’d rather drink battery acid. To, at least, be in the same room while she watches these abominations makes her happy which, in turn, makes me happy.
04/10/2011 at 13:48 Bhazor says:
I have a laptop that cost about the same as my desktop though with lower specs. It runs so hot I have to run in it on a desk to avoid toasting my mallows, it uses up so much power it has to be permanently plugged into the wall and I have to plug a mouse to make it barely tolarable to use. It also hangs for about 5 seconds when I click a web link.
I am not a fan of laptops.
I really wouldn’t consider buying anything more than a little netbook in the future and confine my murder simulators to the desktop.
04/10/2011 at 13:50 smallclaws says:
I had the same problem, but a cooling pad solved the problem. Best thing is I can use it to cool anything down – managed to help my poor overheated Wii out a little while back, as it’s a USB pad and just needs a power source. Bit noisy but worth it to avoid the heat issue when sat on the couch.
04/10/2011 at 13:56 Bhazor says:
That’s my problem with high end laptops. You have to carry so many peripherals and be permanently plugged into the wall it really defeats the principle.
You want to use a computer in the lounge? Then put a computer in your lounge. As long as my netbook can play Civ IV (for Fall From Heaven) and last 6 hours its enough for me on the train.
04/10/2011 at 14:37 Sheng-ji says:
On the plus side, you can just unplug it, carry it through to another room, plug it in again and continue, none of this powering down and packing up nonsense!
04/10/2011 at 13:49 SirForkington says:
I got a Compaq,
350 GB storage
4GB RAM
Dual Core 2.1 GHz Processor
ATI HD 4200 graphics card (dxdiag says that has 1986 MB ram, but I’m suspicious of that)
I got it 3 years ago and it struggles with some games but plays Shogun 2 fairly well.
It’s the only gaming thing I have, being at uni, though I’ve brought the old desktop this year (though she’s old as well now.)
04/10/2011 at 13:49 Irishjohn says:
I use an Hp Envy 14. It cost just under US$1200, with a larger HDD installed and more RAM.
Specs:
Core i5 580 @2.67GHz
8 GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
Basically, I always work with a laptop because I move around a fair bit and work between home and various libraries. This time, I made the effort to get a laptop with a graphics card that would be able to handle decent games. I had gotten back into PC games on my Macbook Pro through Win7 on Boot Camp, but I decided to come back to Windows and knew I wanted a PC that could run modern games reasonably well.
I’m sure that you guys with your desktops will scoff at my little setup but it works just fine for playing new games on the 14 inch screen, and it’s gotten me back into PC gaming in a major way. My only regret is not going the whole hog and getting a 17 inch screen laptop. I don’t really need to be running around all day with the thing so the extra size wouldn’t have been a killer, but it would have been nice to have at home. Future-wise, I am considering buying a large external monitor. Um…. for work.
04/10/2011 at 14:38 FriendlyFire says:
I’m also the happy owner of an Envy 14 (6gb RAM, i5-430M). I’ve had the apparent luck of purchasing it fast enough to get one of the awesome 1600×900 Radiance screens, which is really the sole reason I picked this laptop up. Makes for a fantastically high-density screen at 14″. The colors, brightness and contrast are all lavish.
I’ve also upgraded it to a SSD for additional speed.
04/10/2011 at 14:58 Tams80 says:
You could get a fairly decent monitor for a few hundred pounds.
04/10/2011 at 13:49 Unaco says:
Asus EEE 1215n, that I got a few months ago. It’s sort of Laptop specs, but in a Netbook package. Great battery life (7-8 hours), 2Ghz Dual Core, decent amount of storage, DX11 support (integrated video card AND dedicated NVidia GPU, so get the advantages of both), full 1080p HD Video.
It’s nothing compared to my desktop, or to some laptops, but handles the sort of games I want to play while mobile perfectly well – Frozen Synapse, Europa Universalis 3, Civ 4, AI War. It’s small, it’s light, it looks cool, it runs cool.
Only problem… I hate trackpads. Where the hell is the middle mouse button, or the scroll wheel!?!
04/10/2011 at 13:49 Kronic says:
I’m using a MSI GX660R.
Intel I5-460M (2.5Ghz)
8GB DDR3
ATI HD 5870 (1GB)
2 500Gb drives (RAID 0)
1920×1080
Pretty happy with it overall, plays pretty much everything I’ve thrown at it at a reasonable level. It has an overclock button (warranty covered) which I’ve yet to experiment with, but so far it’s pretty stable. Quite happy overall, cost just over £1000.
04/10/2011 at 14:50 Raniz says:
I’ve got an GT683R, same specs but with just 1TB of disk and a Core i7 and a Nvidia GTX560M.
As a gaming laptop it’s nice. It’s the right size, 1920×1080 and packs quite a lot of power.
As a developers computer it’s even better, it’s got a really nice processor, 8GB of RAM (which I will expand to 16 in the near future) and 1920×1080 means a lot of screen real estate to play with.
It is, however, not that great if you want to run Linux on it. The Intel raid didn’t really play nice with me in the beginning, I can’t get the webcam to work and the recovery disk won’t tolerate having GRUB as bootloader (I had to extract my Windows key using another computer and reinstall using a DVD, because the setup refuses to continue when it can’t recognize the boot loader).
Oh, and the touchpad is awful; no multitouch and the scroll works by pressing the corners.
04/10/2011 at 16:57 rektide says:
The GX660R is a beast, wonderful for gaming or development. I replaced the stock 320GB drives with a SSD and a 750GB spinning disk. USB3, eSata (no FIS switching, you jbod loons out there), 1080p screen, quality speakers, good video card, solid build, low price: incredible system.
04/10/2011 at 17:48 Kronic says:
Oh yes, the GX does have marvellous speakers.
05/10/2011 at 03:40 TenjouUtena says:
I have a GT683DXR which is new. I love it so far, but one minor niggle has been that noone seems to ‘own’ the nVidia drivers for the 570M that’s inside of it. nVidia doesn’t want to give you any, and MSI acts like this version of the notebook doesn’t exist. I can’t plya battlefield 3 on it because of this. Otherwise it’s been great.
It is a 15″ laptop that is the size and weight of a 17″, but the 17″ gaming laptops seem to be just beastly and bigger.
04/10/2011 at 13:50 bill says:
I’ve got a Dell Studio 17 from 2-3 years ago. It seems pretty good – but with a 17inch screen it’s effectively a desktop.
It’s not a gaming laptop at all – but it’s fine for most games. I don’t buy cutting edge games anyway, but it worked smoothly for portal 2.
COuldn’t give a crap about hardware to be honest, but i think it has a 2.2ghz core 2 duo and an ati mobile card. It has a Windows Experience Rating of 5.0 if that helps!
04/10/2011 at 13:50 mongpong says:
Sony Vaio, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz, Windows 7 64 bit, 6 gig ram, ATI Radeon 4650 1 gig graphics. getting on a bit but got it for £300 as I sell laptops (was worth £1000). Love it..HD screen with X-Black technology means it’s pin sharp for watching Blu-rays. Quite heavy and battery life is crap though but never had any problems with it overall.
I just bought some Alienwares though so may switch over…depends on how badly i decide that Batelfield 3 needs to be played on Ultra :)
04/10/2011 at 13:51 Unaco says:
Stop eating my comment!
Asus EEE 1215n, that I got a few months ago. It’s sort of Laptop specs, but in a Netbook package. Great battery life (7-8 hours), 2Ghz Dual Core, decent amount of storage, DX11 support (integrated video card AND dedicated NVidia GPU, so get the advantages of both), full 1080p HD Video.
It’s nothing compared to my desktop, or to some laptops, but handles the sort of games I want to play while mobile perfectly well – Frozen Synapse, Europa Universalis 3, Civ 4, AI War. It’s small, it’s light, it looks cool, it runs cool.
Only niggle… I hate trackpads. Where the hell is the middle mouse button, or the scroll wheel!?!
04/10/2011 at 13:51 Pasperix says:
MSI GX660R
I got this laptop because broadband isn’t available where I live and I have to do all my online gaming at other sites.
Core i7 740QM(1.73GHz) 15.6″ 6GB Memory 640GB HDD 7200rpm BD Combo ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Broadway XT
$1500 (yes, I am ashamed of this) The same system without the Blu-Ray drive is a little under $1200
The other day I played the Battlefield 3 Beta at 1920×1080 on high graphics settings with no difficulty.
04/10/2011 at 13:53 Battlehenkie says:
Because I’m a student and I also travel quite often my main rig is actually a laptop. It’s an Asus N73SV model that costs about 900 euro’s in the Netherlands (I’m a student, would’ve loved to have a little more oomph but those pesky monthly budgets!). For that you get a 17″ Full HD screen with a I7 2630QM and a GT540M. It’s really not on par with what you get for the same money if you bought a desktop rig, but it’s acceptable. In general it’s okay, except for the keyboard-flex and awful inbuilt webcam/mic. It does have the best speakers I’ve ever tried, which seems to be a new line Asus is making. The only two real gripes I have with it are the nVidia card. I used to be a loyal ATI customer and switched to nVidia for a laptop because there’s more range to choose from in gamers laptops.
Big mistake. They have something called ‘Optimus’ which basically renders your computer intelligent: it chooses whether to enable the GT540M or the built-in Intel HD graphics card. Except that it’s absolute shit. I’ve spent hours on getting the nVidia to enable for a handful of games and it just wouldn’t do so. No feedback from nVidia and only 2/3 months after I got the laptop had it been fixed. Tip: go for ATI.
Also not likely to buy Asus again as my built-in wireless card malfunctioned after only 3 months of careful use. I can’t be bothered to send out my only rig for 3 weeks for a replacement card so I’m just using a Wi-Fi dongle.
The thing is, there’s just not that much to choose from if you’re on a budget. In Europe you’re either confined to Dell (horrible experiences with customer service and general trustworthiness of my material actually functioning when I want it to), MSI (their laptops generally look like Santa and his posse of reindeers decorated it with joyous christmas lights) and Asus, which just seems to me like the least crappy of the three. I reckon it’s a niche market that still has to develop, as it’s rather bland at the moment.
04/10/2011 at 13:54 carn1x says:
I’ve been using an Asus 6930G as my main rig now for 2 years, it’s been amazing and not a single problem, and all for an absolute steal for around £700 iirc.
Core 2 Duo 2Ghz
3Gb RAM
Nvidia 9600GS
250Gb HDD
It’s almost time to say good bye to it though and buy another lappy :(. My reasons for owning a laptop were to have a gaming rig I could take with me overseas, but now I live in Hong Kong where room for a desktop is very limited, so I’ll keep playing the laptop game.
04/10/2011 at 13:54 Grinnbarr says:
I got a MSI cx620 for uni with an i5 430M, ATI Radeon HD5470 mobility, 4GB RAM and a 500GB harddrive and it cost me about £600. It also has a low power Intel graphics chip for battery powered use. I can run most older games, ME1/2 and minecraft run fine and i can even play BC2 and company of heroes on low settings. Probably the worst decision I ever made as now I never get any work done. But it’s a good gaming laptop at a good price,
04/10/2011 at 13:55 Starayo says:
Being Australian, I’m used to being completely and utterly ripped off on electronics, but this one wasn’t too bad.
Asus G73Jh. Core i7-740QM CPU, mobility HD5870 GPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB hard drive. Backlit keyboard and a weird stealth fighter-eque design. Also, it funnels air from the front to the back so you don’t hear the fans so much. Only cost me about a grand.
Only issue with it is that it’s huge. 17″ laptop bigger than most 18″+ due to bigass battery. Could only find one big laptop backpack that would fit it and even then just barely.
04/10/2011 at 13:55 Taverius says:
Its a Sager (Clevo) 17″
i7 2820QM @2.3GHz. Hyperthreading (so 8 cores), turbos up to 3GHz or somnething.
GTX 485M 2GB
16GB DDR III
200GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD
750GB Seagate spindle drive
1080p screen
Still manages to run everything smoothly with all graphics options maxed … although we’ll see with RAGE.
Only problem is its a 5kg laptop with a 4kg 240W power brick. and its literally the size of a brick.
04/10/2011 at 18:39 Baconberries says:
Yeaah Clevo!
I just got the Lotus P151HM 1 a month ago and I like it a lot.
The GTX 560M is not exactly top of the line, but it’s moderately better than the 8800GT I had in the desktop this baby replaced, and I’m running the BF3 Beta on it buttersmooth.
Plus as far as I can tell, and I did do quite a bit of research, there is no better bang per buck than with the Sager/Clevo line.
The only downsides of this laptop so far are the sub-par audio jack and the way the fans seem to cycle a bit too much.
04/10/2011 at 13:55 shadowbadger says:
Mines an Acer something or other from a few years ago, I can’t tell you the specs other than I’m pretty sure the graphics card is an NVidia 240M GX or somesuch.
It works fine, all the games I’ve bought have worked great on it (Borderlands, Portal 2, MAss Effect 2, Brink, Batman Arkham), gets a little hot when it’s on my lap but means I get to sit in the lounge while my wife watches some tv abominations like Greys Anatomy, X Factor and I get to blowup stuff on my computer.
Cost me something like £450 – best money I ever spent
04/10/2011 at 13:55 Anominity says:
MSI GX660R 15.6″ WLED
Intel I5-460M,
6GB DDR3,
1TB HDD,
ATI HD 5870 1GB GDDR5
Bought it to go to LAN with as it is far too much effort going with a desktop. Over all, very impressed, plays everything I have asked, now just to test out BF3 with fingers crossed.
04/10/2011 at 16:35 Telos says:
I have exactly the same laptop. It does run BF3. I haven’t updated the drivers yet (like I was told to) so there are a few graphical glitches. I have no idea whether a driver update would fix that though. Good news is, that on low settings I get a constant 60fps and it looks pretty damn good aswell. (Full resolution 1920×1080). I Can put it up to full and it’s still playable, I just like my shooters to be butter-y smooth.
04/10/2011 at 13:56 pyjamarama says:
I which I had an Alienware M11x small and powerful.
04/10/2011 at 13:56 Unaco says:
System seems to be finding my comments quite tasty… cos they’re just getting eaten.
I have an Asus EEE 1215N. Laptop sort of specs, in a Netbook package. Great battery life, small, portable, looks cool, runs cool… yet has DX11 support, 1080p HD video support, plenty of storage, 2 graphics systems, integrated and dedicated, so can get the best of both. It’s nowhere near the grunt of my desktop (or some Laptops), but it plays the sort of games I want to play while mobile no problem – AI War, Frozen Synapse, Europa Universalis 3, Civ 4.
04/10/2011 at 13:56 Nils says:
I’ve got an MSI GX740, and I love it, now that I’ve found a decent enough cooler. I can’t stress enough how crucial a laptop cooler is if you get one designed for gaming. Here’s the one I got: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834991042
04/10/2011 at 13:56 Lord Custard Smingleigh says:
How did you get a picture of my laptop?
04/10/2011 at 13:57 ThinkAndGrowWitcher says:
My sexy little 2yr-old Acer Aspire 6935g still teases me into playing mucho gameage, the little pixel-wanton hussy.
It’s been a brilliant way to play almost all games over the last 24 months at 30+ fps (usually on medium to high levels, but no AA) at 720p or 1366×768.
For example, the 258,873 Unreal-engine based games all run very nicely, which is just fine by me. Will obviously want an upgrade for dx11 stuff like Witcher 2 and the Metro games though.
Was an absolute bargain at £330
(Though possibly nearer £785.66 if you include credit card interest)
16″ screen (1366×768)
2.8GHz Core2Duo
Nvidia 9600m 512MB (with the slower DDR2 memory)
Wired Xbox 360 controller
Massive bastard Steam library.
04/10/2011 at 13:58 The Spoon says:
I used to have an Acer Aspire laptop that I’d use for gaming.
It started off pretty good, but due to shoddy manufacturing and constant terrible repairing by Acer, the thing felt like it was on fire even when i was just sat on the desktop.
Plus that corner rubbed my wrist like there was no tomorrow when in the WASD position. :\
04/10/2011 at 14:00 Cunzy1 1 says:
I have a laptop that is pretty old. I don’t even know the name or make of it. Maybe it is a Toshiba. I don’t even let it online! I’d love to be a PC gamer proper but I just don’t have the time, money or inclination. Most of my gaming is done in hour long chunks of time so I need to be from not gaming to playing a game in as short a time as possible. This is why I am sad face at the PCyfication of consoles. Probably best summed up by this video http://roosterteeth.com/archive/?id=3575 OnLive was looking like my perfect solution to lazy gaming but I’d still need to use my nonPC devices for non PC games which sorta defeats the point.
Specs: Probably worse than your current phone.
Cost: About a grand ten years ago.
Happiness: Pretty happy actually. The laptop with no name runs Syberia, Syberia 2, Starcraft, Warcraft and the original Half Life games which keeps me happy. RPS and Youtube is my window into the lovely world of PC games.
Niggles: For the last five years there’s a stupid pop-up that appears telling me that some file or other relating to some software I no longer run cannot be found.
04/10/2011 at 14:00 parm says:
Dell XPS 15 – the one from about a year ago.
i7 something or other. Base clock is about 1.7GHz, going up to 2.mumble GHz
2GB GeForce 435
4GB of RAMS
640GB of hard discs
1080p screen
It runs most modern games pretty well although it struggles at full 1920×1080. It also gets quite hot and the battery is annoying if you have it in your lap. It’s luggable rather than portable, and honestly I prefer gaming on my (rather older) desktop. My next laptop will be an Ultrabook or an Air-a-like and I shall stick to doing work and playing Minecraft on it.
(I’ve also got a netbook which is fine for playing rather older games so long as they deal with stupid 1024×600 screen res. I love my netbook)
04/10/2011 at 14:02 Milky1985 says:
My gaming laptop is a very very poor beast, stuck with intel ingerated graphics (which according to the spec docs i dug out, has basic pixel shaders but for some reason no vertex shaders).
As such my laptop gaming tends to be older games or 2d indie games from steam, last tuime i took the laptop away i played a lot of terraria.
Anyway spec below
Core 2 Duo 2.13
1 Gig Ram
Intel Integrated graphics
Windows Vista (yes i know, no-where near enough ram for vista, worked like a charm while i had the beta windows 7 installed on it)
Only cost me £50 so was well priced really (worked at the store and it needed repairing so as long as i srted the repair (for free) i could take it at that price)
Has served me well but might be upgrade time this xmas!
04/10/2011 at 14:02 Kaira- says:
HP dv7 something something, can’t remember right now what the model was. 4Gb RAM, AMD HD6550M, AMD Turion II P560 @ 2.5Ghz dual-core processor. Very happy compared to my previous one (Acer Aspire 8530G), which was just a pain in the ass and works now as a Linux-programming-media-puter. Also, runs The Witcher 2 which was all I wanted from it.
04/10/2011 at 14:02 Staggy says:
The power:price ratio for gaming laptops has always always put me off forking out for anything beyond something of netbook quality. But since Onlive arrived in Blighty, I actually find myself escaping from my dark gaming den, plugging an ethernet cable into my Acer WordProccessingPaperweight (TM) and sitting out in the sun during my second playthrough of Deus Ex.
It’s not perfect, but playing on a lower resolution screen with grapics far better than what the hardware is capable of, alongside a vastly cut price alternative to getting a proper gaming laptop, it makes it a no brainer.
04/10/2011 at 14:05 Lars Westergren says:
I have an Asus G73JH. I paid something like 2000 pounds for it, later models have become much more affordable.
PLUS:
+ It has comfortably played everything I’ve wanted for years. Only Witcher 2 gave me that old itch to upgrade, and now that Batman: Arkham City and Bioshock: Infinite is on the way I am considering buying a new one which doubles as a home theatre PC. Not decided if that will be another laptop.
+ It is fairly silent, and don’t get too hot, much thanks to the big fans.
+ It’s not beautiful but it looks fairly discreet, unlike most gaming PCs it doesn’t look like a 12 year old’s Transformers fantasy, so I can take it to conferences.
+ It can double as my programming/photo editing machine, and unlike a stationary computer I can put it away while not using it, so it doesn’t clutter up my living space. This is more important to me than the FPS/money ratio.
+ I have dual housing so I can carry it with me.
+ Very sharp screen.
MINUS:
- As usual with PC laptop makers the driver support is atrocious. With Starcraft 2 my troubles started, it claimed it required newer Radeon drivers, so I tried downloading and installing the latest Catalyst drivers directly from ATI. The result was a terribly unstable computer which froze randomly. Uninstalling Catalyst turned out to be a nightmare but finally I managed to get back the Asus approved laptop drivers. Amnesia refused to run at all, but Asus didn’t update their homepage for years. Finally I found a way to update the firmware of the graphics card at a forum. The attitude seems to be “you’ve given us your money, now piss off.”
- If it is not plugged in the battery runs out in about 1.5 hours. It is not something you can watch DVD on when on a journey, it is a stationary replacement.
04/10/2011 at 14:06 Capt Fatbeard says:
I’m using a Sony Vaio E series laptop with an Intel Core i5 M450 @2.4 GHz, 4gb’s of RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 5650 1gb with DirectX 11. I used it whilst at Uni last year as I was moving about a lot, and to be honest its been pretty good. I’ve been using a laptop for gaming for the past four years because of Uni and never had any real problems sure I can’t play all my games on the highest settings but how else can I play games in bed! Oh it cost around £730 I think but that was august last year so probably cheaper now. I do expect to buy a new desktop soon when I have the room and the money but at the moment it just isn’t practical for me to do so. Plus I can play ARMAII and RO2 on pretty much full graphics which is all I really care about!
04/10/2011 at 14:06 oozlum says:
An Asus G73JW thing – 17 in screen, occasional crashes, plays RO2 fine on high. Very much a desktop replacement – needs wall power all the time when gaming. But it’s a lovely beast. Very happy with it.
04/10/2011 at 14:06 parm says:
Dell XPS 15 thing from about a year ago. i7 of some sort, 2GB GeForce 435M, 4GB RAM, 1080p screen, blah, blah. It plays most games, although it struggles at 1080p or if you turn the shinies up too far. Most stuff about 2-3 years old runs well.
It’s a pain in the arse, though – it’s heavy, and hot, and the battery is worthless, even though I shelled out for the super-inconveniently-shaped extra-long-life one. It’s also had one motherboard replacement already because of a knackered GPU. Desktop gaming is definitely preferable; my next laptop is going to be an Air or an Ultrabook or something like that and I will use it for work, retro/indie games and Minecraft and I will be happy.
(I also have a netbook that runs old games pretty well so long as they cope with the retardo-screen at 1024×600)
04/10/2011 at 14:06 zergrush says:
I got a Samsung RF511 a couple of months ago.
Got this because since I needed a mobile computer to use at college I might as well get one I can play some games on.
Specs:
i5 2410M
6GB DDR3
NVidia GT540M
750Gb hdd
Blu-ray reader
It cost me the equivalent of about US$1.100, and so far I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve played plenty of Dead Island, SCII and the BF3 beta in it and it’s managed to run all of them pretty well.
04/10/2011 at 14:06 dubyabyeats says:
I picked up a replacement for my Dell XPS m1330 which really wasn’t much of a machine for gaming on.
The most cost effective replacement I could find was a 15″ Acer 5750G with an nvidia gt-540m graphics card (plays just about everything quite adequately). Intel I7 processor for the number crunching and 6Gb of ram
Quite adequate came in at about €800. Should do for those mobile lan parties I occasionally indulge in.
04/10/2011 at 14:07 Gundrea says:
I have a massive Acer 8943G which I took apart here.
Needless to say I judge the quality of a laptop by how well you can bludgeon someone with it.
04/10/2011 at 14:07 lucaryholt says:
I’m gaming on a Acer 3820TG. It’s a 13,3 inch, but it can handle BF3 with everything on Medium.
I’m overclocking it and using Game Booster, which helps a lot. I don’t need to play games with awesome graphics, I just want to have fun!
04/10/2011 at 14:08 zebby says:
I got myself an Alienware M17xr3
i7 2820QM @2.3GHz
750hdd
Radeon 9990M 2GB
8GB GBB
Blu-ray
1080 screen
Biggest issue I have is that Dell is awful at updating drivers.
And the first one I got died immediately, BSOD after a few minutes of anything graphically intensive. Dell graciously replaced it – a month later and numerous calls back and forth to Alienware support.
04/10/2011 at 14:09 TazzAtNL says:
You guys should check out the dutch site http://tweakers.net/archieven/tag/best+buy+guide/
Every other month a new update for laptops, the other month for PC’s.
04/10/2011 at 14:09 DanPryce says:
I exclusively use a laptop for gaming. I initially plumped for a laptop because, at the time, I wanted the mobility. Not necessarily the ability to play on trains and stuff – gaming laptops are sort of useless if they’re not tethered to a plug socket – but I needed to move it between home and uni (not to mention the missus, who until recently lived in a separate town). In rare cases like that where you’re splitting your time between locations, a decent gaming laptop is a convenient alternative to a desktop.
But that’s a pretty narrow spectrum of useful situations. I’m sure other people have other reasons for preferring a laptop. Don’t get me wrong; I love my laptop. It’s got a pretty good spec. I couldn’t tell you the exact details off the top of my head; It chugs a bit under Just Cause 2′s weight, but it can run Far Cry 2, Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum at full settings without fuss. I’m extremely happy with it.
But I would trade it for a desktop any day of the week. The ability to move your gaming around can only go so far. You lose the ability to upgrade easily; you lose the ergonomic/chiropractic benefits of sitting properly on a chair at a desk using a properly angled keyboard; it’s a sod to have to plug everything in every time. Be under no illusions (and I’m sure you’re not); desktop PCs are just better.
04/10/2011 at 14:10 Jams O'Donnell says:
While I do use my laptop for gaming it’s not a gaming laptop (it’s an ancient ThinkPad) and the games I play are strictly DosBox fare, with the occasional exception like Infinity Engine RPGs (Baldur’s Gate etc).
04/10/2011 at 14:11 PodX140 says:
Proud owner of the Sony Vaio SA, it’s a bit small for most gamers (13 inch), but it’s perfect for portability, and has the same resolution as most 17 inch laptops (1600×900). Plugged in (Haven’t tried it without plugging it in) it runs any new game at max graphics at it’s resolution, though I haven’t ventured into metro 2033 territory yet.
Specs (For the $1500 model):
Quad core i5 @ 2.3GHz,
4 gigs of DDR3 Ram
AMD Radeon HD 6630M
1x 500gb HDD
I’m extremely satisfied with the build quality, and I can carry it anywhere and use it anywhere without worrying about the battery life (It has a regular battery that’s 6 hours or so of Chrome, the extended lasts for I am told 12 hours more. In reality, I find it’ll last 12-14 hours or so with the extended battery (Which looks like it’s built into the laptop, it’s well made. And light!) chrome open with multiple tabs of flash games open).
And extremely important for any laptop gaming is the cooling, which is stellar. It vents out the back with the extended sheet attached, through both the back and bottom (I think? I haven’t taken off the sheet since I’ve gotten it) without it. I never have an issue with my lap being hot. However! If you do plan to game in a quiet area, I hope the other people don’t mind hearing a sound similar to a quieted jet engine firing up (It’s not that bad, but in a library setting it would annoy people I would think). It’s a cool sound (IMO), and it does what it sounds like.
Issues that I’ve had so far are mostly minor, one is that if placed in a backpack without a cloth sheet over the keys it WILL leave smudges (No scratches yet though) from the keys pressing on the screen, but this is in an overpacked bag so maybe I should just stop putting my jacket in there. Another one I’ve had is with Catalyst Control Center, it occassionally crashes every so often, though it’s quite irritating when it happens. Some games will pause (usual), others will not(unusual but still common). The worst will crash when the graphics card does (Though that’s extremely rare, I can’t think of the last game that did that). CCC comes with all AMD cards, and I hate it. Also a big issue for me is that the card is not supported by AMD, but rather are distributed by sony. This may be an issue in the future when a game is crashing due to drivers, but I’ve been fine with all the latest so far.
I’m extremely happy with the laptop and would very strongly advise anyone with such a pricepoint and higher to look into it.
04/10/2011 at 14:11 yrrnn says:
I do most of my gaming on a desktop machine, but I got myself a 13″ Macbook Pro earlier this year and decided to take it along to a LAN party, and it held up surprisingly well. I still prefer doing my gaming at a desk on a nice big monitor, but never again am I going to bother lugging my heavy-ass PC over to friend’s houses for LANs.
04/10/2011 at 14:12 Clavus says:
I have a MSI GX640 with a Mobility HD5850. I use it mainly for Source games, which run just fine at highest settings. It does tend to get a bit noisy though.
04/10/2011 at 14:56 aldo_14 says:
MSI GX640 here as well, but with the CPU upgraded to an i7-720Q (for ref, the other specs are 4GB DDR3 ram and HD5850 with 1GB DDR5, plus a rather reflective 15″ screen).
Runs most recent things pretty well, but not at maximum settings.
Noise thing is spot on, too. Also has some heat issues.
04/10/2011 at 14:12 deanb says:
Samsung N150
-1.6ghz single core
-1GB RAM
-Integrated CPU
-1024*600 resolution (scales to 1024 x 768)
This is my desktop – http://i.imgur.com/gFLYK.jpg
I find it an awesome portable gaming machine. Sure it won’t run Human Revolution, but when you’re out and about those aren’t really the games you want to be playing. Frozen Synapse is by far my favourite game on the system, sure it churns a bit processing AI turns but it’s nice and slow paced, just what you need when handicapped by a trackpad. Onlive is a recent addition, going to be uninstalled soon since my screens limitations fall below the required (despite Onlive website saying it runs on netbooks. Mines a 10.1″, which is on the large end of netbooks). Somewhat disappointing as I was really hoping it would make it a great all round machine. Portable, cheap, and can run Space Marine.
I only started installing games on it as a joke, it was always meant to just be a portable web and writing machine, but I was surprised at how many games ran pretty well on it. Humble Indie Bundle and GoG have certainly helped swell it’s ranks. And it’s not like they’re bad games either.
I’ve never really been keen on the idea of a full on laptop, especially spending as much that a gaming laptop requires. Way too many horror stories, and near impossible to self-repair. But I’m loving my little samsung netbook. Does everything I want out of a laptop, and a little bit more. (Oh apart from iPlayer, that doesn’t run too well.)
04/10/2011 at 14:13 Melliflue says:
I have an old Samsung R720 and it is my only computer so all my games are on there. The specs are
Core 2 duo T4300
4GB Ram
ATI Mobility 4330
320GB hard drive
I bought it for £650 in 2009 and its age is showing. It coped with Portal 2 on native resolution (1600×900) on low settings but it can’t run Just Cause 2 on that resolution, or Magicka, which disappointed me. I don’t think it would cope with most new games.
04/10/2011 at 14:14 pakoito says:
It’s a netbook, 1.2 Celeron with INTEL GMA 4500 MHD.
I barely runs warcraft 3, so I play indie games mostly. I can’t play Binding of Isaac tho, because it goes at 10 fps.
#poorasarat :sadface:
04/10/2011 at 14:14 PodX140 says:
Spambot eating my posts! And I had such a good review of my laptop up :(
Sony Vaio SA, $1500 base model, fantastic resolution (for a 13 inch), and runs everything on max no problems.
04/10/2011 at 15:37 Lars Westergren says:
My post was also eaten, I hope the RPS guys will find and restore it, since I can’t repost it – “Duplicate post detected!”. I think it is the spam filter that eats posts though. Spam bots are the vermin who spews out the spam, making the spam filter necessary.
04/10/2011 at 16:12 PodX140 says:
A flag as spam function would work really well, if you tie it to a certain account. That way, if you wanted to remove spam you could, but if it’s found out that you just took out a post for funsies, you yourself would be ip banned from making new accounts. The only fault I could see is proxies and ip spoofing, but I don’t really see that many trolls around here (which may be the spambots doing, but still) to do that.
04/10/2011 at 14:17 roryok says:
Macbook Pro 17″ from 2006, a Core2Duo 2.66Ghz, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon Mobility x1600 256Mb. Currently running Windows 7 although I haven’t gamed much on it since I switched from XP. The last modern game it did justice to was Bioshock, which it hefted around at an acceptable framerate (albeit with middling settings)
I have noticed almost everyone so far has mentioned why they have the laptop, usually for work, or college or whatever. Has anyone bought a laptop just for gaming? Or is it that we all feel the need to justify the choices we made, like we all must have done originally for our spouses / bosses / company purchasers / bewildered friends?
I might be replacing mine next year, and I was considering one of these beauties.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/26/razer-blade-hands-on-with-17-inches-of-gaming-greatness/
For Gaming.
And maybe I could do some work on it at some point.
04/10/2011 at 16:14 PodX140 says:
You really ought to put /sarcasm at the end of your post, because angry hordes of internet men are probably ready to break down your door for that post. Also, why link to engadget when RPS did a piece here?
Something smells off…
04/10/2011 at 16:36 apa says:
Asus F3JP with Core2Duo 2GHz, 2GB, Radeon Mobility x1700, 15.4″ 1680×1050 from … 2008? This used to be pretty powerful for a laptop. And yes, I got this for gaming.
My next computer is going to be a small Macbook Pro and it’s for gaming too.
04/10/2011 at 16:47 emotionengine says:
Oh I thought I would have the oldest Macbook Pro on here, looks like you beat me. All of my gaming needs are served by my 2007 Macbook Pro 15″ with Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz, a staggering Nvidia 8600GT Mobile with whopping 128MB of video RAM and 4GB main system RAM. Recently upgraded the harddrive to a 750GB 7200RPM Seagate model. That said, it works surprisingly well. Since you mentioned Bioshock, that ran fine on max settings on the native 1440 x 900 resolution. Mass Effect 2 looks and runs just fine on high, as do the likes of Arkham Asylum and even the leaked Deus Ex HR preview build on medium. Fallout 3 is fluid too on fairly high settings, as is Borderlands and no problems at all with Source titles. I’m honestly amazed and thankful for this.
05/10/2011 at 10:51 roryok says:
@PodX140 Eh… I wasn’t being sarcastic at any point in that. In retrospect maybe I could have stuck a wink or smiley face at the end, I suppose it came off a bit smarmy like “you all can’t admit you bought a laptop just for gaming but I can”.
oh dear. It does look a bit like that actually. =/
I simply meant that we’ve all been there, looking at two or three laptops and trying to justify extra expense for some other reason, when the real one is GAMES. Sometimes we fold and go for the low powered one and struggle on, sometimes we find some other reason, like ‘video editing’, that we can use to justify more firepower. Sometimes, we’re men and we can buy a machine just for games if we like.
I have never yet been one of the latter ‘men’. But THIS time around… THIS time, I’m going to choose games first.
I think.
I really want one of those Razer Blades, but they’re so bloody expensive that I’ve almost talked myself out of it and into a 15″ Samsung Series 7 (http://bit.ly/oygvtg) instead. Literally the only reasons I can justify the almost thrice-the-price blade are that gaming trackpad thingy, and the slimness. There are any amount of other cheaper gaming laptops with better specs, although most more closely resemble a small car with the bonnet open than a laptop
I’ll never find a way to justify a Razer Blade over one of these, no matter how hard I try. If I want one, I’ll have to step up to the plate and say I want it for games. I’ll also have to sell some organs.
PS: I didnt realise RPS had covered the blade, in fact, I was even going to suggest to them that they do, after commenting. I’ve now read Jim’s excellent piece.
04/10/2011 at 14:17 Yorick says:
When I moved to the States I sold my tower machines and bought a Macbook Pro.
Mid-2010 13″, 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, GeForce 320M
I mostly play games through Mac Steam, some old stuff (Beyond Good and Evil, GTA2 currently) through a Windows VM. I used to dual-boot, but I don’t bother any more. For most of my gaming purposes it works just fine.
Next year I need to build another tower machine for a research project, GPGPU programming so I have an excuse to slap three or four high-end graphics cards and 24GB of RAM in there… I’ll probably hold off on Human Revolution and Skyrim until then.
04/10/2011 at 14:21 Zanchito says:
Asus 1215N netbook. 12″ with NVidia ION graphics and dual core. Battery life is enough for bus trips, around 3.5h watching 720p videos. For gaming, it’s not quite there, though. You can use it of presentations and some light document editing no problems, so it’s a nice “productivity” netbook with decent multimedia capabilities (it even has HDMI out), and some oldie games. 1080p content I haven’t tried, but I have a feeling it’d chug a bit.
04/10/2011 at 14:21 Faceless says:
My Acer laptop struggles to close a tab in Firefox, never mind games.
04/10/2011 at 14:23 Anthuzad says:
Ive got a Clevo D901C, also known as Sager 9262 with:
2.66 Ghz Q9450
4GB DDR2 OCZ RAM
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Geforce 8800m GTX SLI
And a OCZ Vertex 30GB SSD for good measure
Everything runs well enough, sometimes I have to turn off aa though.
04/10/2011 at 14:23 Ernesto says:
I’m using a Lenovo T61p. 2.4GHz Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX 570m graphics chip. Even after 3 years it’s quite a powerful machine, in my opinion.
Anything sourcey runs fine, Bioshock and Far Cry 2 played ok. No luck with anything more recent, except low-fi-graphics indie titles.
It’s designed as a workhorse, not a gaming machine. But it has one huge advantage: the TrackPoint! With a little exercise it’s possible to play FPS with it. Do THAT with a bulky touchpad ;)
04/10/2011 at 14:25 kurtcocaine says:
The ASUS ROG g7x series.. Best value for money gaming notebooks IMHO..
I’ve personally owned a G73jh-A2 for the past 1.5 years and used it for all my gaming need. Only recently with few games such as crysis and BF3Beta have i had problems with running everything maxed out..
I personally feel if you have the money and are looking to buy a DTR class notebook, go for an alienware or clevo system coz they offer the highest end cards but if you’re on a budget and looking for something in the ~$1500 range, nothing beats the ASUS RoG series..
04/10/2011 at 15:00 Mr Bismarck says:
Another vote for the ASUS Republic of Gamers machines here. I have a RoG custom built by Xotic PC and got an i7, 16GB of RAM, a 1.5GB GTX 480M and an SSD/HDD combo and I adore it.
Despite being an absolute beast for size and weight it is still, obviously, considerably more mobile than a desktop. It’s just that that mobility is of the nature of put-laptop-in bag, put-bag-in-car, drive-to-destination, game. It isn’t something I’d ever want to carry through an airport
The fans on the back of this thing are huge and make the machine run practically silent, even when you’re really cranking the graphic settings, which is a great step up from my previous MSI machine which sounded like Airwolf was landing in my living room.
The switch to a laptop has been essential to me since the advent of my own children, as it means I can go from nought-to-gaming in 15 seconds, (taking quick advantage of naps), while still being on the couch and, therefore, able to have one of those conversation things with the other half while she watches TV.
04/10/2011 at 15:28 Pete says:
I have an Asus ROG G51J from last year: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/ASUS_G51JX_Core_i7_3D_Laptop_G51JX-IX192V/version.asp#top
Very expensive, but works well; good thermal management for a laptop, in a cool room it can just chuck all the heat out the side without heating your lap up too much. Runs Just Cause 2, DX:HR (slightly stuttery), Civ IV, etc.
It came with a set of 3D shutter glasses, which I experimented with but found to be gimmicky and headache inducing.
04/10/2011 at 14:26 alphager says:
I work as an IT-consultant on-site at the customers location all over Europe and couldn’t take my desktop with me (transporting 20 kilos of expensive electronic devices by plane is not listed under “fun”in the dictionary!), so I bought a MySN XMG7.c (which is fancy-talk for a Clevo 8670CU barebone laptop).
It set me back ~1600€ and comes with a 19″ Full HD screen (unfortunately of the glare-variety), a 1st generation i7-620M (fastest Dual-Core available at the time; I still think that more cores are wasted on gamers, as most engines still have problems fully utilizing two cores, let alone 4 or 8), 4GB RAM and a Geforce 585M. In hindsight, I should have saved 200€ and gotten the Geforce 580M, as the ~5% performance increase was not worth the money.
I bought an additional 4GB when RAM was cheap in spring this year.
I can play all games in my native resolution on high settings, though I usually disable things like motion blur, as I prefer the sharpness.
Just Cause 2 and Crysis 1 run perfectly smooth on it; most games I play are capped by the refresh-rate of the display (why yes, I play with VSYNC on!).
Ironically, I play mostly older games bought in Steam-Sales, with a bit TF2, Magicka and BC2 thrown in.
The battery never lasted long (90 minutes of web-browsing at peak performance; less than 45 minutes of gaming), but I play in the evenings in my hotel-room or on long train-voyages within Germany, where the ICEs have outlets at every seat.
The laptop is damn loud, but I play with headphones on, so it doesn’t stress me.
04/10/2011 at 14:27 JamesPatton says:
I have an Acer Aspire 5739G which could play Arkham Asylum on high settings a few years ago, and can now manage DXHR on low, which I’m pretty happy with. It can technically run almost anything.
BUT, it struggles with anything high-end because the fan has to work overtime. A few months ago it was incapable of playing The Void or Empire: Total War without overheating and shutting down. I got the fan cleaned and since then it’s been okay, but I can never play anything demanding without wondering whether I’m slowly killing it.
04/10/2011 at 14:28 rocketman71 says:
An “old” Acer with a 9600GS. They seem to be the only ones not asking for your kidney whenever I want to buy a laptop with a barely decent graphics card. It’s my third one in a row, and not exactly because I’m fond of their tech support.
04/10/2011 at 14:29 Yargh says:
My work laptop happens to be a pretty decent gaming machine: Dell Latitude with an i7, intel/nvidia 4200M graphics and a full sized backlit keyboard.
Most of my gaming is done on my home desktop but this certainly runs most of my games when on the move.
04/10/2011 at 16:03 westyfield says:
I use a Latitude as well, it’s lower-spec than yours though (E6420). 15-inch screen, i5 processor, can’t remember the other parts. I haven’t actually used it for gaming yet – recently arrived at uni and haven’t had time for gaming. Plus I haven’t got round to getting a mouse for it and I can’t face gaming with a trackpad.
04/10/2011 at 14:33 RogerMellie says:
I have a desktop too but I recently picked up the updated Macbook Air 11inch for portability. Through the magic of Steamplay I tried out a few games and if you don’t mind being plugged in, it works OK for easyish games. Civ 5, Portal, Half Life 2, Frozen Synapse etc are all OK.
The fan whirs like a blighter and it can get pretty toasty but the performance was a pleasant surprise. Don’t get it for gaming but if you get stuck in a hotel it can while away a few hours.
04/10/2011 at 14:40 Solidstate89 says:
It’s not technically a gaming laptop, and the only games I really play on it are turn-based strategy games like Frozen Synapse and the like because I have a nice desktop to handle all of that. But it is a nice laptop nonetheless.
Dell Precision M4600:
i7 Sandy Bridge Quad-core @ 2.2 GHz
Quadro 2000M Workstation Card with 2GB of vRAM
8GB of DDR3 RAM
128GB mSATA SSD
320GB HDD
1920×1080 Wide Gamut display with RGBLED backlighting
All in a nice 15″ package. I definitely can’t complain. It is a beast of a powerhouse, but the graphics card drivers since it’s a Quadro just aren’t optimized to run games like the GeForce cards. It is optimized to run CAD applications like Unigraphics and Inventor – which is the main reason why I purcahsed it. To help with the FIRST Robotics team I volunteer for at my old high school. None of their computers could properly run Inventor and I needed a new laptop, so I purchased a portable worsktation.
It still runs games like Frozen Synapse with aplomb thanks to the beast of a processor it has though.
04/10/2011 at 14:45 deejayem says:
I’ve been doing everything on a laptop for a few years now, which I bought when I moved to a tiny tiny London basement. It’s an old Rock Pegasus, which is a bit of a white elephant these days since Rock has gone bust. Intel Duo something something, Geforce card, 2GB RAM. It runs most recent games pretty well on lower settings. Only complaint is it’s melted two graphics cards, and replacement parts are a bugger to get now Rock is out of business. On the plus side, I can huddle round it for warmth during the cold cold winters.
I’ve also got an eee pc for long train journeys, which I use mostly for word processing and Infinity Engine games.
Thinking of graduating back to a desktop now I’ve tunneled my way back to surface accommodation.
04/10/2011 at 14:46 andytt66 says:
Alienware m11x, that I picked up in some sort of 10%-off sale a month back.
I can play Deus Ex : HR on something the size of a netbook, that’s really quite a feat.
04/10/2011 at 14:51 olemars says:
I have an ASUS M60. with a quad core i7 (either1.6 or 1.8 GHz, can’t remember which), 8GB ram and a Geforce 240M with 1gb memory. Also room for two HD’s. It’s not top of the line but it works fine for all my games, even new ones. It’s also been rock solid, no problems at all, which is a solid step up from my old HP where the mobo died twice a year.
04/10/2011 at 14:52 fer says:
Members of ARPS may be interested to note that all of the missions I create for the socialist agrarian utopia that is the Folk ArmA2 sessions are made using an Alienware M11x R2 with the following specs:
CPU: Core i7 640UM (4M Cache, 1.20 GHz)
RAM: 8GB DDR3
GFX: 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M
HD: 320GB SATA (7,200rpm)
The unit is tiny, but heavy. It’s my everyday work computer, travelling with me everywhere, as well as secondary gaming machine (I have desktop unit that is less well spec’d but has an 8800 in it that does a better job running ArmA2). ArmA2 is playable with medium settings, and in other games the performance has always been perfectly acceptable. My only real issues are with the heat it generates and lack of numpad (there isn’t even the option to toggle certain keys into numpad mode, as on other laptops).
Given that this has to travel every day, get used in client-facing situations (you can switch off all the lights!) and allow me to play and edit ArmA2 missions, I’ve been really impressed with it.
04/10/2011 at 14:52 fescrb says:
I have an Acer TimelineX, it has a dual core Intel i5 (4 logical threads, though) and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650.
It’s alright for gaming, lets me play stuff in medium to high settings at full resolution, with some form of anti-alias. ATI drivers have given me a few nightmares but all in all I’m quite happy.
Edit: forgot to say-> 1Giga of Ram and 1GB video memory. Also a VERY slow 500Giga HDD, which I’m replacing with a 750GB 7200rpm HDD as soon as my delivery arrives.
04/10/2011 at 14:57 EOT says:
The only laptop I’ve ever played games on was some HP thing that I bought from Curries about three years ago. It had some 512mb ATI card in it, 2Gb of RAM and an Athlon X2. It was ok I guess especially for the £250 I paid for it. Though considering I only paid £400 for my current desktop about a year ago I am somewhat of a gaming cheapskate.
Current specs on the desktop being; Phenom II 955 BE OC’d to 3.7Ghz (still on the stock cooler, its never gone above 55C), 6Gb of 1600Mhz Corsair RAM, MSi mobo and an HD 5770. So, not great and I skimped on the GPU. But I’ll be getting a new one of them soon.
04/10/2011 at 14:58 gwathdring says:
My parents offered to subsidize a certain amount of my laptop as part of college preparation, and I forked over the difference to make it a passable gaming machine. As such it is not the laptop I would have chosen were I in the market specifically for a gaming laptop, but rather the best gaming machine I could make out of a consumer laptop.
I went with a Dell Studio 15. I have a Core 2 Duo at 3.2 or so GHz, a 512 mb Radeon mobile card (I think it’s the 4570, with decidedly non-desktop performance), a damn good and rather cheap pair of Kosch headphones to replace the terrible build-in speakers, 4 gb of RAM, and around a 256 Gb hard drive.
While it overheats more now than it used to (I need to clean some of the dust out eventually), it runs quite well with a raised cooling pad. Unfortunately i have horrible luck with cooling pad fans, and finally gave up on them altogether. My current setup involves a like metal stand with lots of tiny holes in it and a very small desktop fan blowing air along the underside. As my air intakes are underneath my laptop, this would probably make things worse if the now-defunct cooling mat weren’t such a fantastic heat sink.
I can run almost all of the games I own on medium or better settings (Just Cause even worked on maximum settings for a while until I visited the house o a friend who had a cat … I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I really need to clean the thing). The Battlefield 3 beta, unsurprisingly, ran terribly on my graphics card. Assassin’s Creed 2 ran fabulously, though, as did most of the games of that approximate release period.
My main lament is that I can’t run Cakewalk Sonar well enough to easily multi-track. I can’t just sing or play along with a recording and have only systematic latency to correct for. Instead i have enough of a variable latency that I end up having to use kludgy workarounds and a bit of time distortion to get everything fitting together properly. Essentially I am held back by the lack of desktop cards. My processor came in just behind the i-series of cards, but my processor could handle a lot more than it does now if the weight were shared with dedicated sound and better dedicated graphics. I am currently saving for my graduation gift to myself: a custom built gaming and recording machine.
I don’t mind playing games on medium or even low settings, but it’s too hard to get a good recording sound out of a processor-only system.
04/10/2011 at 15:02 Earl-Grey says:
My current gaming machine is a Multicom Kunshan P150 (or in other words; a Clevo/Sager P150 customized by a Norwegian company called Multicom).
It has the following bells and whistles:
An Intel i7 2720QM CPU with 2,20 ghz.
4 gb of DDR-3 RAM.
An AMD Mobility Radeon HD 6970 M with 2 gbs of DDR5 memory.
A Seagate Momentus XT 7200 hybrid harddrive with 500 gbs of storage space.
A 15,6″ matte screen with a native resolution of 1920×1080.
And a full size keyboard with a numberpad.
The price for all this whistleblowing and bellringing was 14000 norwegian kroner, roughly 1500 of your british pound sterlings.
I justify this by telling myself every night that I will one day use it for 3D modelling and programming as I’m studying to become a computer engineer with a specialisation in games programming.
The machine is pretty much constantly connected to my television.
The good bits:
So far it has been more than competent at handlig whatever modern games I’ve thrown at it; Crysis 2, The Witcher 2, Space Marine, Shogun 2 and so forth.
The design is nice and subtle, if you like that sort of thing -boring, in other words. Unlike the loud, flashy Alienware gizmos the kids are using these days.
The build quality is generally good.
The less godd bits:
The hardware does require quite a lot of cooling, so during gaming the fans really become noticeable. -unless you use headphones or a nice set of speakers.
Although the keys are good, typing does become a bit of a hassle sometimes. I find that because of the added numberpad the keys are a little to far to the left, if you understand what I mean. I usually type without looking down, but because all the keys aren’t where my “fingers” remember them to be. I try to shift the position of my hands to compensate but they just slide back after some typing.
-also the keys are also a bit rickety.
The mini-jack port is for some reason on the right side, so the wire to my headphones sometimes has a far to intimate relationship with my mouse for my liking. -no problem if you’re a lefty, I suppose.
It’s quite heavy.
In summary:
It serves it’s purpose as a gaming machine. I quite like it, a lot.
The plan was to use this machine for schoolwork aswell, however I could not find anyone willing to carry it to school for me so I have one of those sexy little Apple devices for light programming, playing old classic games, typing, web browsing and such.
04/10/2011 at 15:04 Dobalina says:
I snapped up this deal (Dell Inspiron 17R N7110) a few weeks ago as the specs seemed incredible for the price. All in all it cost me 350quid and there isn’t a game I can’t play on it.
I have it hooked up to the TV downstairs: it can play all games at 1080p with settings turned down to Mediums, or (as I mostly use it) at 720p with everything High. The GT 525M seems to be excellent! On the move it’s a little heavy as 17″ laptops are, but knowing I can play any game in my Steam library without a problem is worth the weight!
I can’t justify paying twice or three times as much as you would on a gaming PC just to match the performance, so I was never looking for a top range gaming laptop. But being patient and waiting for a good deal has paid off, which is what I’d recommend others to do, along with not being conned into paying more just because something’s got the word GAMING in it, or multiple X’s!
04/10/2011 at 15:09 pagad says:
I have an HP HDX 18 with 4 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 130M. I picked a laptop for a gaming PC as lugging a desktop one through my student years was rather unappealing. It’s served me well for the last few years, but within the last few months crashes while playing games are becoming more and more frequent – and these aren’t crashes to desktop, but “black screen, popping noise and dead laptop” crashes. I used to think it was a heating issue – HP laptops have notoriously bad cooling systems – but a trip to the repair shop disabused me of that notion, and now I think it’s a Windows 7 compatibility issue.
In any case, it needs replacing, but I’m an impoverished unemployed graduate so that’s not going to be happening for quite some time. It’s extremely frustrating because there are so many games that I want to play that are either recently released or coming soon and I can’t/won’t be able to play any of them.
04/10/2011 at 15:11 Radiant says:
I don’t see the reason for a gaming specific laptop.
The problem for me with ‘gaming’ laptops is that for the same price you can get a rather hefty desktop behemoth.
Playing a mouse and keyboard game on your lap, sitting the sofa, using the couch as a mouse mat, whilst the god damn nuclear reactor powering the thing is soft boiling your testicles is ridiculous.
Not to mention upgrading the thing is impossible.
Most people who have the money for a luxury laptop would just buy an apple.
04/10/2011 at 16:16 PodX140 says:
I bought a business laptop that excels at gaming, at only a marginally more expensive pricepoint than an apple (1500). Then again, I’m a student so my desktop no longer was going to be used, so this IS my desktop.
04/10/2011 at 17:27 adwilk1231 says:
You clearly don’t know much about gaming laptops. My laptop is very upgradeable including the video card and so far my testicles have avoided being cooked.
04/10/2011 at 17:31 Snuffy the Evil says:
I didn’t buy a gaming laptop just for the sake of a gaming laptop- I was in the market for a portable computer for college that wouldn’t be horrendously obsolete in three years. I needed something I could take to classes and home on the weekends that could also run more intensive software like AutoCAD or Photoshop or what-have-you.
The games are just a bonus, really.
04/10/2011 at 18:24 Mr Bismarck says:
> I don’t see the reason for a gaming specific laptop.
Since I added a human female and then some tiny humans to my life my primary gaming time has shifted from large tranches of uninterrupted weekend hours to desperate snatches of an hour while the babies are sleeping.
Having a laptop means I can game from the couch during these unpredictable moments which also allows me to talk to the Missus while she surfs or watches TV.
I also have a powerful gaming desktop in another room and yes, it did cost less money, but I don’t remember the last time I switched it on, because it doesn’t fit into the lifestyle right now.
> Playing a mouse and keyboard game on your lap, sitting the sofa, using the couch as a mouse mat, whilst the god damn nuclear reactor powering the thing is soft boiling your testicles is ridiculous.
There are laptop cooling trays available now. Personally, I have a two-legged laptop table. The feet slide under the couch and the laptop then sits at whatever height I want without compromising my ability to spawn further offspring. Though now I have two babies it should feel free to nuke my nuts.
The table has a mousepad section on the side, but I have previously gamed with a mousemat on the couch arm. You’re right that that probably wouldn’t work for twitch gamers.
> Not to mention upgrading the thing is impossible.
No. No it isn’t. I already upgraded my SSD in the three months since I bought the unit because a bigger one went on special offer. The CPU, HDD and video card are also within easy reach should I want to beef them up.
My old “gaming” laptop was an MSI that sounds very much like what I presume is your experience – loud, hot and difficult to upgrade, but that was a “media” pc that could stretch into some gaming. My ASUS was a gaming machine from conception and like most tools designed for a specific purpose, it’s good at that purpose. My MSI was a shoe to bang in nails, my ASUS is a magnificent golden hammer with diamond inlay that menaces with spikes of Adamantine.
04/10/2011 at 15:20 Joe Duck says:
I have a custom laptop built by the very fine folks of PCSpecialist. It has a chassis built by a company called Clevo and you can basically configure and choose all the components. It is very well built and the one I chose has a 1080p screen, a Sandy Bridge i5, 750 Gb HDD and a Nvidia GTX560M. Of course, USB3 and the rest of the normal ports are included, as well as bluetooth and wifi. It runs BFBC2 at max settings, Shogun 2 at almost max and Portal 2 at max too. The screen is awesome, it looks way better than my desktop monitor, albeit smaller. I love the machine, it is not showy, matte black with no markings and does exactly what I need it to do, that is carry around my Steam games and let me play anything without thinking this is a laptop and not my desktop. It is the best LAN party machine I have seen, I just sit down and fire up the game. My friends usually have a oldish laptop that they do not maintain, and it is sad to see them pull down the graphics options to the min in order to play games like Sactum or L4D in our LAN parties. I am lucky because I am more current. Yes, a good, good machine…
HOWEVER:
- For a 15″ laptop, it is very heavy. It has all those fans and radiators for the micro and for the dedicated graphics cards (yes, two graphics cards, the gaming one AND the stupid Intel 3000 one). It is awfully heavy and the HUGE transformer does not improve matters.
- Sandy Bridge offers the possibility of switching off your gaming graphics card and using the Intel one in order to save battery. This would be cool to do BUT this particular model does not allow this, my Nvidia Card is always on. This is not the case in every model, just this particular one. In any case, I cannot do intelligent battery management. And that brings me to problems 3 and 4.
- Battery life is 2-3 hours while gaming. It is pretty short for taking a train, going to the airport, flying and taking a train till destination. I already know where to find plugs in 3-4 european airports, I am always looking for a plug.
- This particular chassis puts the batteries inside a compartment fixed with screws, so taking a second charged battery pack is not really an option, as I’d have to take a screwdriver as well. And screwdrivers are not very popular in airplanes.
I very much recommend a custom built Laptop, but be aware that it will be an extension of the PC desktop experience, a big heavy machine with loads of power that gives you as much pleasure as work you are willing to put into it.
04/10/2011 at 15:30 Obliter8 says:
MSI GT725
Processor – Intel Core 2 Duo P9500 2.53 GHz Dual-Core
RAM – 4 GB (installed) 4 GB (max) – DDR2 SDRAM
Hard Drive – 500 GB
Operating System – Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Screen – 17 in 1680 x 1050
Optical Drive – Blu-Ray Drive/DVD Super multi
Graphics – ATI Radeon HD 4850
Not my main gaming rig, but more than capable for gaming when away, or when a gaming chum comes round for impromptu LAN. It’s not heavy, looks great, blu-ray playback via PowerDVD is lush and it was only £1100 new.
My only bug-bear is battery life which is about 1.5 hours of gaming. If I could strap some mighty 20cell battery to it, I would. Otherwise, I would definitely buy again.
04/10/2011 at 15:36 Danny says:
I’ve bought a Dell XPS 17 recently, with the following specs:
i7 2630
GT555m 3gb
12gb RAM
120gb SSD (and 500gb sata for storage)
17″ screen @ 1920×1080
It cost me around €900. Main purpose was to be able to play The Witcher 2, Diablo 3, Skyrim, BF3, etc. So far it runs everything I throw at it at native resolution. Having great fun with Red Orchestra 2 and the BF3 beta.
Besides being able to play games again it’s the screen itself that I love most. Lots of space to use while browsing, but the resolution and awesome colours (Anandtech rated it as one of the best screens on the market < 1500 euro) allows me to watch the occasional 1080p movie / tv show when I don't have access to my media center at home.
04/10/2011 at 15:41 wodin says:
I’ve got some advice…get a desktop…you get more of a gaming bang for the buck…plus upgradeable..but if you want to spaned about £1500 to £2000 on a gaming laptop be my guest…more moeny then sense.
04/10/2011 at 16:20 PodX140 says:
Different devices for different needs. I’m not about to give up on gaming just because I’m only home for 8 hours a day (And that’s for sleeping). The rest of the time I’m at school, so a strong laptop is a must for me. I spent 1500 on mine, and it’s still VERY upgradable, I can add 14 gigs of ram, and add another harddrive. Not that I see that necessary any time soon considering I’m playing dead island at max and D:SF at max as well.
Oh and my resolution is pretty superior to a common monitor, at least when it comes to clarity and pixel density. I have a 13 inch screen with 1600×900. I can’t even look at my 23 inch 2048×1152 anymore, the clarity is just too poor.
04/10/2011 at 17:33 adwilk1231 says:
Different strokes for different folks. What maybe more important to you say 10% better performance or saving a few hundred may not be someone else’s priority.
My lapper is very upgradeable. I can easily get to the CPU, GPU, WiFi card, RAM, fans. Would I have been able to get a nicer desktop sure but for me being able to take it any where in the house was worth the extra 300$ or what ever. My wife wants me around and this lets me hang out with her while she does what she wants to do and I do what I want to do.
04/10/2011 at 15:47 telpscorei says:
Ah me laptop. I have a full tower rig for my serious gaming (new games or stuff that plays well with a mouse rather than a touchpad), but I do have a few classic games installed on my laptop.
My laptop (a Toshiba A200 Satellite something or other) has some AMD card in there, so it can probably handle more than I throw at it (the card is there to help with some video editing stuff I do from time to time). But, given a laptop’s smaller display, smaller keyboard and lack of a mouse, I usually prefer to play action / new games on my main rig.
Games on my laptop include;
UFO: Enemy Unknown
X-Com: Apocalypse
Fallout 1 + 2
Jagged Alliance 2
Alpha Centauri
04/10/2011 at 15:51 mlaskus says:
My laptop is getting a bit old now so it’s specks are irrelevant, but generally it’s quite possible to grab a decent gaming machine for under $1000.
I favour 13 or 14 inchers, with good mid-range graphics cards. Nvidia is preferable due to Optimus, which lets you get some decent battery life out it.
04/10/2011 at 15:56 shadowmarth says:
Myself and two of my friends have good gaming laptops (or at least they were when we got them) for college and other shit. It’s excellent if you commute a ton (which I did my first year), or if you have friends who like to LAN, but otherwise, don’t fucking get a gaming laptop. If you want a mobile computer with which to take notes (something highly overrated for most classes compared to paper and pencil), I would recommend either getting a very cheap laptop, or one of the subnotebooks everyone has these days (if you go that way though, make sure to test out the keyboard before buying. Some of them are painfully cramped).
Then build a real desktop for gaming. Gaming laptops are fiddly as hell to get certain shit running, and they overheat extremely easily compared to desktops. Me and one of my friends have laptops that are almost identical in all hardware, but from different manufacturers. Even these two functionally identical ones have drastic differences in performance on certain games. And that’s not even worrying about the lack of upgradeability or malfunctions. I ended up paying half the cost of my laptop to get it repaired recently, due to the rare and specific nature of parts used in its construction. If I had known how much it would cost up front, I would have used that money to build a desktop that would have outstripped it in specs by a ridiculous amount, thanks to the passage of time and progress of technology.
Don’t get a gaming laptop.
04/10/2011 at 16:01 Catastrophe says:
I currently use a MEDION ERAZER X6811 15.6″ Laptop for gaming. Its good quality and good specs for a good price, would definately recommend :)
http://www.medion.com/gb/electronics/cat/Gaming/gamer_notebooks_17?sortOrder=PRICE_ASC&page=1&hitsPerPage=10
04/10/2011 at 16:09 kud13 says:
I’m cruising with a Toshiba Satellite. it’s the second Satellite I bought,, and since i’m a student living away from home, my laptop has been my primary PC for over 7 years now.
currently, I got a Satellite P505. it’s a 19-inch screen behemoth, featuring a 2.2 GHz Intel Dual core, 6 gigs of RAM, 500 GB hard drive (augmented by a 2 TB external HD), and a set of powerful integrated speakers, running windows 7 in 64-bit.
the only downside of my preciouss (aside from it not fitting easily in a conventional school bag), are the integrated Intel graphics. which, technically, should bar me from using it as a “gaming” laptop.
nonetheless, I can run almost anything on it, albeit usually at lower settings. only games to date that explicitly refused to launch due to a weak graphics card were Mass Effect, and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. While I was able to run DXHR, the Witcher 2, DA:O, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP on it.
04/10/2011 at 16:11 Syra says:
I’m a laptop gamer through and through, haven’t had a desktop since 2003 my advice is this: DO NOT BUY IN THE UK.
Shit is hell overpriced, like literally up to 50% overpriced. I’ve been doing a lot of research into my next laptop purchase (probably an asus g53sx) and I find that importing is MUCH smarter and cheaper, including delivery from the US and tax.
That’s before you even mention that Dell XPS systems are all ddr3 vram and have rubbish marketing gimmicks like giving you a 3gb gt555m when the chipsets maximum memory is 1.5gb. And they have the gall to tell you it is dedicated. YEAH BUT IT’S SHARED.
On another note guys, remember that LAPTOP i5 PROCESSORS ARE NOT QUAD CORE. They are dual core and sneaky as fuck, because they will say things like i5 processors are quad core (referring to desktop) or featuring intel quadcore processors (referring to i7).
I’m glad RPS have made a post about laptop gamers though. BRING IT TO LIGHT.
05/10/2011 at 00:23 matrices says:
Well that’s not quite true – i5s are indeed quad-cores unless you’re running a specific kind, like the one in the Alienware M11X, which is the “UM” version, and those are quad-threaded but not with physical cores.
04/10/2011 at 16:14 Syra says:
also
http://www.bestgaminglaptop.net/articles-guides/top-10-gaming-laptops/
04/10/2011 at 16:22 Sandmandan says:
Im using a basic long battery life, low powered duel core Acer Aspire (runs at 1.3GHz I believe) with 3GB ram and a 13in screen. Plays most things that ive chucked at it including Space Marine (although to be fair thats on Onlive), also day of defeat, Tropico 3, Men of War and a few other games.
04/10/2011 at 16:23 Katsumoto says:
To avoid toasted bollocks, I use this from Ikea (http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/60150176/?cid=en%3Epc%3Ego%3Eproducts_search) though i’m fairly sure anything like it would do. My actual laptop is a Dell Inspiron 15R which I picked up for just under £600. It has an i5 and a 525m and actually runs almost anything I throw at it smoothly (inc. recent games like Deus Ex: HR). The only thing i’ve tried on it that it really struggled with was Metro 2033 (though that was perfectly playable so long as you can sacrifice the odd bit of graphical hoo-har).
04/10/2011 at 16:32 adwilk1231 says:
I picked up an alienware x17 earlier this year. It was 1900 and I upgraded the ram and wifi card myself. I love how easy it is to work on these laptops. All I had to do was remove a couple of screws and I had access to everything I needed.
Card: 6970
RAM: 8 gig @ 1600
CPU: i7 2720QM
I love it. To do any heavy gaming you have to be plugged in but I love the switchable graphics for when I just want to surf the net. For some strange reason my wife likes to have me around so the lapper allows me to hang out in the same room with her and still play which keeps us both happy.
04/10/2011 at 16:34 GC says:
I bought a nice 17.3″ more than one year ago, I currently play BF3, DXHR, RO2, TM2:C etc on it, graphic options between medium-max with some of the costly ones on low (shadows, water, …)
It is based on a CLEVO barebone, filled with selected standard hardware : i7 M620, ATI M5870, HDD 320Go, local keyboard, no operating system (I get them for free at school), no malware preinstalled.
1920*1080 screen of excellent quality, solid (and bulky). 6kg makes it a bit heavy for everyday transportation in a backpack.
There are websites selling them in US, UK, FR, DE, ES, and probably more.
Sager sells some Clevo under a different name.
04/10/2011 at 16:56 Sui42 says:
I have a high-end version of this:
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-l702x/pd
…and it runs great. But as many people have pointed out (including Tom Bramwell!), it’s not really a laptop. It’s a behemoth of a machine. Technically it’s a “desktop replacement” laptop, which sounds ominously like it’s part of some master machine-race designed to forcibly retire obsolete desktop crates using lasers and rockets and stuff.
Does make you wonder whether we’ll still even HAVE desktop PCs in 10 years. My laptop is only slightly worse than a similarly-priced desktop, and benefits from being (comparatively) compact and portable, with no dangly wires anchoring the monitor, mouse and keyboard bits together. As the margin between laptop and desktop specs tightens, I can see less and less consumers choosing to buy a big bulky machine over something they can carry around their house and use in different rooms (personally I love taking my laptop downstairs and plugging it into the HDTV – running games on a 1920×1080 res is super fun).
The only thing that needs to be addressed is cooling. Obviously the main reasons that PCs break down is due to heat, and my laptop gets super hot when running high-end games, like the Battlefield 3 beta for instance. To clean the fan I have to physically scrape dust off the exterior mesh with a pin, as I don’t want to void my warranty by crackin’ her open any time soon. They really should design a way to make the process much easier. One plus is that the battery pack protrudes from the bottom of the machine, acting as a sort of wedge to keep the laptop above the desk and actually allowing AIR to get to the fan (oh my god!). I had to prop my last laptop up with books to stop it from overheating (luckily I had a lot of books as I was an English student. Now that I’m an English graduate and my laptop props ITSELF up, I have absolutely no use for said books. They’re all just ink and paper, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?)
04/10/2011 at 17:13 Azhrarn says:
I have an ASUS N53SV, there are multiple versions of this laptop, mine has a 1080p screen rather than the default 1366×768. As for the other specs.
i7-2630QM (base clock 2GHz)
6GB DDR3
nVidia GT540M
640 GB HDD
DVD-player/burner
Windows 7 Home Premium
Most games run pretty well on medium settings at 1080p, high settings generally get a bit choppy as the GT540M really isn’t designed to push that much graphical horse-power around.
It cost me €999 from an online retailer, and while the battery has some issues (it appears to discharge far to quickly when it’s turned off, as in several percent per day) but beyond that it’s just fine.
Most of the time you’ll be gaming with it hooked up to an outlet anyway as it would probably drain the battery in a matter of minutes if you turned it to it’s “high performance” setting and started a modern game on it.
04/10/2011 at 17:30 baseendje says:
Hi, I have a barebone 17.3” (LG Full HD)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT555m 2GB GDDR3
• CPU: Intel Core i7-2720QM (sandybridge) special edition (8Mb Cache), Clock speed 2.2 – 3.3Ghz (turbo)
• IGP: Intel® HD Graphics 3000
• Corsair 8GB DDR3-1333
• Free windows 7 student license
•
And I payed only €799 (685 GBP) for it (^_^ ). I now have it for about 3 months and I must say I’m very pleased with it. It has a solid build, the battery lasts for about 4.5 hours if I don’t use my GT555m (games like TF2 or L4D run smooth on IGP anyway). When I turn my GPU on the battery life is significantly reduced, but hey if I want to play GTA4 I usually have excess to AC. It is only a 100 grams heavier than my old 15” laptop. Unlike a lot of gaming laptop it doesn’t look like a plastic toy with flashy lights, it just looks cool.
Cons: The speakers aren’t very loud (though loud enough for me), even though there is still some space it doesn’t have a full numpad… and well… it was a bargain, but not free .
Furthermore I get why people don’t understand what the added value of gaming laptop is over a pc. Of course the argument against a gaming laptop is that you can get comparable performance on a cheaper gaming PC. BUT there is only one problem with that: If you (like me) travel a lot (train) and wish to game at different places (lanparty’s etc.) and prefer to work/play on the same computer regardless of your of your location (home/work/partner) or even want to be able to move your “business” to let’s say the kitchen table or terrace, a laptop is significantly easier to move around.
So the bottom-line is: I really like my laptop and having a performance laptop in general, I’m kind of new to the brand clevo, but in my case I’ve found that they deliver a really good quality over price ratio.
As a response to some comments: I have never had trouble with overheating, running any software/games or whatever. Not with this laptop and not with my old one (sony vaio)… what kind of low grade hardware do you guys buy that you have all these problems?
04/10/2011 at 17:31 Saint_loup says:
A 13′ Macbook Pro late 2009. Don’t laugh. Please, don’t laugh.
Though I’m a bit surprised how able and future-proof it is. This laptop has never been designed as a gaming rig (no dedicated graphic card, 2 Go of RAM upgraded to 4), yet I’m able to play recent-but-with-old-engines games like Deus Ex 3 or Portal 2. By “play”, I mean “play at 15-20 FPS with low-mid settings”, so that’s far from an optimal gaming experience, but still, that’s something.
04/10/2011 at 17:36 McDan says:
All I know about my laptop is that it’s an intel core i3, because there’s a sticker that says so. It plays games quite well I think, played dragon age origins on medium graphics with no problems, and play online with Arma 2 and other stuff alright. I like it, but it obviously isn’t the best.
04/10/2011 at 17:39 der jester says:
I’m running with an Alienware m11xR2, I picked it up via Dell Outlet for about 700 US after timing it right and stacking coupons.
specs
Core i5
GeForce 335M
4GB RAM.
I chose the m11xR2 for quite a few reasons. I needed something portable, so a 17″ desktop replacement with 15 minute battery was out of the question. The M11xR2 has the NVidia Optimus chipset so it auto switches between the on board Intel graphics and the discrete Geforce card. This gives me around 8 hours of battery life when I’m not gaming which is a godsend. I even get around 2 – 4 hours when gaming. It’s light weight and fits in my bag without crippling me.
Most new games I have to run at low/med or without extra bells and whistles. It has Display Port and HDMI out so if I’m feeling saucy I can plug it in to my HDTV to play video games on. I’ve got a Dell 24″ monitor as well when I feel like sitting at a desk. The LCD on the laptop could be better, I think they may have improved it on the R3.
To me it’s midway between enthusiast and casual user. I really didn’t want to have to fiddle with things to get games working, and I don’t have to for the most part. For newer games I sometimes have to add the game to the high performance profile to force it to use the GeForce card. I had a hell of a time getting BF3 to work in Alpha.
For the price and feature set I’m happy. The mobility and battery life was the clincher. I recently dropped in an SSD and it’s amazing.
04/10/2011 at 17:59 phatbhuda says:
15″ LED Backlight, Quad Core i7 2.2 ghz, 8 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 6750M 1GB, $1900.
Oh yeah, it’s a MacBook Pro.
04/10/2011 at 19:48 PodX140 says:
I’m curious, what resolution is that? And what’s the battery life like? Weight is I assume pretty stellar, given most Macbooks are, but how’s the cooling? I looked strongly into getting a mac before picking up my Vaio SA, and am still curious on what to recommend to my friends.
04/10/2011 at 18:55 PapaVoodoo says:
I’ve a Compaq CQ60.
I can’t quite remember the exact hardware details save for the fact that they were impressive.
However, I would never recommend it to anyone, the model has a huge problem with overheating; the core is never below at least 75 Degrees Celsius, and often reaches in excess of 100.
Pretty much unusable for game after the first hour.
04/10/2011 at 19:22 matrices says:
Alienware M17x R3 – fairly basic version
320GB HDD, 4GB RAM, 460m, 120 hz screen, BR drive
The great thing about this machine is that it was only $1600 since it was a refurb from Dell Outlet. Basically there is no reason not to buy from Dell Outlet – you get the same 1-year Dell warranty and any issues are merely cosmetic (based on three recent purchase experiences).
What I love about 120hz screen is that you get the extra smoothness. 460m isn’t really good enough to push modern games beyond 60 FPS, which is what would need to happen to experience that smoothness in games, but it’s still nice to have for older games.
04/10/2011 at 19:28 Kaldor says:
I still use an Acer Aspire 5920G with a Geforce 8600mGT, 2GB RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (probably still fairly up-to-date in comparison with the graphics card). Since I’m a student and constantly living at one place, going home in holidays and weekends, a laptop simply seemed like the best compromise of being able to occasionally play at will. I can’t play modern high-end games, of course, but I can still play anything that Bioware released recently, for example. I probably have the stagnating effect of the consoles to thank for that, along with other original buyers of the 8800GT generation, if they are still using that model. Nevertheless I have been thinking more and more about buying a new one, since you get a relatively fast one with 540m for around 500€. But then, even that would still be expensive and slow compared to a similarly priced desktop model, so I might finally decide on a stationary machine.
04/10/2011 at 19:34 AmateurScience says:
I use an ’08 Macbook 13″ (the last model before the 13″ aluminium turned ‘pro’) BootCamped with win7. Can’t play anything too mental but it plays well with Fallout/Bioshock etc so 08 era games.
I should point out that it wasn’t purchased with gaming as it’s primary purpose (it is a Mac after all, although the gaming scene seems to be picking up apace since they started using x86 processors).
And yes Mac’s are expensive, however, I’ve yet to see a Win 7 PC with a form-factor anywhere close to the 13″ unibody with all the components – discreet graphics, great screen the trackpad is worth the price of entry alone (not so great for gaming but hey). It’s light 2cm thick and the size of a sheet of A4.
All in all it’s great for what I need, it’s been a lifesaver these past few months (I’m out in Africa doing some field research) and I have no desire to step up to a 15″ so I’m ssticking with this baby until I can find something the same size with more grunt that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
PS I should point out that I got this with educational discount for £799. I appreciate that the current 13″ are >£1000 and now have no discreet graphics.
04/10/2011 at 19:38 RogB says:
dell studio XPS 1645,
core i7 (8cpus @ 1.6ghz), 6gb ram
windows 7 64,
rubbish for gaming. win7 takes 10 mins to boot so it has to be hibernated each time…
my 3/4 yr old desktop (dual core) whips it for performance every time.
04/10/2011 at 20:15 Alkaine says:
I got my first laptop 6 years ago (Compaq presario R4000) when I started uni in a different city. Since then I’ve only owned laptops, and played all my games on them. I now own a 3y/o Sony Vaio NS11/s, which is a fine piece . It won’t play terribly demanding current stuff, but for example Fallout NV runs smooth on it.
I don’t mind having to lower some settings for some games. I wouldn’t contemplate having a desktop at this stage, I move a lot.
04/10/2011 at 20:20 apachebreak says:
Toshiba Equium P-200 1IR – Dual core 1.6G processor, 2G of RAM, integrated graphics, Vista. 172 monitor.
Bought because Curry’s offered 12 months interest free credit for a 10% deposit and I am perennially skint.
I emulate NES, SNES, Megadrive, PC Engine, N64, Saturn, GBA, etc, and play PC games that can cope, like Dawn of War, Civ III, Alpha Centauri, and lots and lots of Dwarf Fortress during the long winter nights. Dwarf Fortress is how I found RPS originally (tinypirate’s tutorial was posted on here when I was still sobbing at the UI).
Next laptop will need to have enough about it to run Space Marine :)
04/10/2011 at 20:43 shiajun says:
My gaming laptop is a Dell XPS 17 (also known as L702x). Of course it’s on the bigger side but it suits my lifestyle. I take my computer with me from my apartment to my lab and back again, and on some weekends I commute back to my parents’ house in another city, so a desktop PC would have meant no gaming more me on these trips and even on long holidays it’s a pain to lug around a desktop. Plus, it seems heavy to ligher users but I’m pretty much used to it by now. So far, I’m extremely pleased with this laptop. Only niggle is by some bizarre design decision they placed the Nvidia card just below my left hand’s wrist, and during gaming, without the cooling pad, it can get quite toasty down there. It’s also 3D capable, if I ever felt inclined to game that way….which I don’t since Nvidia’s 3D glasses are expensive as hell. Burned a huge chunk on savings on this thing, but it’ll last. My previous laptop was a Dell Inspiron 9400. Lasted 5 years and is still going. Had to change because my computing work will require a bigge beast to handle all the data handling.
Specs:
Intel Core i7-2630Q @ 2.00 Ghz
4 Gb RAM DDR3 (up to 16, saving up for the updgrade)
Nvidia Geforce 555M GT, 4 Gb (overkill, for the time being)
17.3″ screen, 1920 x 1080, shiny
500 Gb HD, 7200 RPM x2 (one has windows 7, the other has Ubuntu for work)
keyboard + keypad
JBl speakers…and they a nice woomph. It has a small subwoofer. Has a very nice round sound
Bigs fans and a battery that raises the laptop, though I use a cooling pad that raises it a bit more.
If you can afford it, I really recommend it.
04/10/2011 at 20:44 shiajun says:
My gaming laptop is a Dell XPS 17 (also known as L702x). Of course it’s on the bigger side but it suits my lifestyle. I take my computer with me from my apartment to my lab and back again, and on some weekends I commute back to my parents’ house in another city, so a desktop PC would have meant no gaming more me on these trips and even on long holidays it’s a pain to lug around a desktop. Plus, it seems heavy to ligher users but I’m pretty much used to it by now. So far, I’m extremely pleased with this laptop. Only niggle is by some bizarre design decision they placed the Nvidia card just below my left hand’s wrist, and during gaming, without the cooling pad, it can get quite toasty down there. It’s also 3D capable, if I ever felt inclined to game that way….which I don’t since Nvidia’s 3D glasses are expensive as hell. Burned a huge chunk on savings on this thing, but it’ll last. My previous laptop was a Dell Inspiron 9400. Lasted 5 years and is still going. Had to change because my computing work will require a bigge beast to handle all the data handling.
Specs:
Intel Core i7-2630Q @ 2.00 Ghz
4 Gb RAM DDR3 (up to 16, saving up for the updgrade)
Nvidia Geforce 555M GT, 4 Gb (overkill, for the time being)
17.3″ screen, 1920 x 1080, shiny
500 Gb HD, 7200 RPM x2 (one has windows 7, the other has Ubuntu for work)
keyboard + keypad
JBl speakers…and they a nice woomph. It has a small subwoofer. Has a very nice round sound
Bigs fans and a battery that raises the laptop, though I use a cooling pad that raises it a bit more.
04/10/2011 at 20:54 Magical Melvin says:
I’m using a Dell Studio XPS Laptop:
Intel Core2 Duo CPU
2.13GHZ
4.0GB RAM
ATI MOBILITY RADEON HD 4670
Runs old games fine as anything – can’t run Red Orchestra 2 well at all though.
Not a good one for gaming, really…
04/10/2011 at 21:02 Elos says:
Had a gaming laptop once, a fancy new Acer with a mobility 9700 and everything, and I hated it. It was noisy, oversized, heavy, generated heat like a small sun and had constant driver problems. I used it for games like three times while out and about, so the “gaming” part of it was entirely pointless.
Now I have a modern desktop gaming that I keep upgrading from time to time, and a Dell laptop from the year 2005 or something for taking notes in class etc.
04/10/2011 at 21:03 Sojha says:
HP G62, playing everything in 800×600
04/10/2011 at 21:47 Sui42 says:
I have a high-end version of this:
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-l702x/pd
…and it runs great. But as many people have pointed out (including Tom Bramwell!), it’s not really a laptop. It’s a behemoth of a machine. Technically it’s a “desktop replacement” laptop, which sounds ominously like it’s part of some master machine-race designed to forcibly retire obsolete desktop crates using lasers and rockets and stuff.
Does make you wonder whether we’ll still even HAVE desktop PCs in 10 years. My laptop is only slightly worse than a similarly-priced desktop, and benefits from being (comparatively) compact and portable, with no dangly wires anchoring the monitor, mouse and keyboard bits together. As the margin between laptop and desktop specs tightens, I can see less and less consumers choosing to buy a big bulky machine over something they can carry around their house and use in different rooms (personally I love taking my laptop downstairs and plugging it into the HDTV – running games on a 1920×1080 res is super fun).
The only thing that needs to be addressed is cooling. Obviously the main reasons that PCs break down is due to heat, and my laptop gets super hot when running high-end games, like the Battlefield 3 beta for instance. To clean the fan I have to physically scrape dust off the exterior mesh with a pin, as I don’t want to void my warranty by crackin’ her open any time soon. They really should design a way to make the process much easier. One plus is that the battery pack protrudes from the bottom of the machine, acting as a sort of wedge to keep the laptop above the desk and actually allowing AIR to get to the fan (oh my god!). I had to prop my last laptop up with books to stop it from overheating (luckily I had a lot of books as I was an English student. Now that I’m an English graduate and my laptop props ITSELF up, I have absolutely no use for said books. They’re all just ink and paper, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?).
04/10/2011 at 22:08 jama says:
Please let me have 5 seconds of spotlight and +1 my epeen:
Clevo W150HRM case (very nice overall, solid built, USB3!)
15.6″ 60hz TFT non-glare 1600×900 (wish it was 16:10 instead of 16:9!)
Intel i7 Q2630
Nvidia GT555M – still about 50% weaker tan my Radeon 5770 in my desktop :(
6GB RAM
500GB HDD
And all that for 900 euros.
Man, but that battery life is horrible… but yeah to be expected and don’t care, it’s stationary at the Uni place with a power plug 24/7 ;)
04/10/2011 at 23:54 El_Emmental says:
=> http://www.notebookcheck.net/ :
Excellent database with reviews (internal and external), specs and benchmarks (with several framerate test, and different settings test for several games) for ALL mobile GPUs (for the entire GPU list : http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Laptop-Graphics-Cards.130.0.html )
It’s the gpureview.com for notebooks, really.
=> http://www.notebookreview.com/ :
Excellent and most complete forum I found regarding gaming notebook and notebook-specific problems. If the information is not already on it, a user will provide the right URL in the next 48 hours.
…
I’ve got a Dell XPS M1530, still alive despite the nVidia Geforce 8600M GT 256Mo faulty chip wot can fry at any moment (see details at the end of the comment).
Bought in Feb, 2008 (4 years soon !), for the equivalent of £850 (with a 9-cell and bag)
Specs :
- CPU = Intel Core2Duo T7250 @2GHz (stock)
- 2×1 GB RAM (can’t get my hand on exact spec, even Dell Support Service Tag doesn’t provide more infos – and I don’t have the right tools to open it right now)
- GPU = nVidia Geforce 8600M GT 256Mo
Before the hats/new weapons not having LOD models (=low details version), I could play TF2 on medium-high. Nowaday, I can only play it on everything to the lowest setting + DirectX 8.0 (-dxlevel 80) and get framerate drops when someone wear the latest hats/effects (tried Irish Fortress to disable hats/effects, sadly sv_pure is almost always set to “2″ to prevent material hack cheating).
It can still run Red Orchestra 1 and Killing Floor pretty fine. And that’s a 4 years old model.
…
What broke and had to be replaced :
1_(!) Had to change the power charger 2 years ago after the original one died (fried before exploding, lucky !), and get it imported from the UK since the models sold in my country were based on the Dell original design. The Dell design was analyzed by a passionate of electronic hardware, who proved that the design was highly vulnerable to static electricity (= no protection at all), especially since the cable was acting like an antenna (no shielding at all).
=> These 2 major errors were responsible for hundreds/thousands of fried power supply unit and small electrocutions (= from wrist to forearm/mid-arm level of discharges – experienced several shocks myself), forcing the users to RMA the entire computer (since it’s welded on the motherboard), and when the notebook is out of warranty, to buy a new notebook and throw the fried XPS away.
note: XPS is supposed to be the “high quality stuff” from Dell, especially with such prices. For an unknown reason, they use the same crappy power chargers for the XPS and the cheapest Dell notebooks. Everything else is okay regarding quality.
2_(!) Had to change the HDD (250GB WD Blue Caviar, 5400 rps) 1 year ago, it was starting to die. 3 years for a WD is a little bit low in my opinion, I moved around a lot though.
3_(!) Had to change the 9-cell battery 1 year ago, since like any other battery, after 3 years of daily use it began to wear out (and I really needed full capacity). If you plan on storing a spare battery, 40% charge at 10 to 15°C with low humidity and away from sunlight, “only” -10% to -5% capacity per year.
4_(!) Had to change the keyboard 2.5 years ago. Being under warranty, it cost nothing except some of my mobile phone monthly credit for Support testing. The new keyboard was now shielded where the original one broke, kinda proving the original design was faulty.
Nothing else broke so far, the case is intact (the acidity of sweat from my left palm slightly attacked the aluminium case but that’s all I can see, no cracks or broken plastic anywhere).
…
*** Tips – Facts – Feedback *** (after 4 years of notebook gaming)
- Gaming laptop are easily overheating, clean them often and always leave some space under and around the case for the airflow. This is vital.
- Notebook optical disk drives are always worse than desktop ones. A third of your CD/DVD/BR will make the sound of a drill press (literally) because the CD/DVD/BR is not 100% balanced, while it will fail to read some of them. Don’t expect anything good from them (hopefully, digital distribution took over).
- Gaming laptop often have 5400 rps HDD, if this is becoming a problem with some games, get a 7200 rps HDD.
- No matter how much money you’ll put on it, there is always a chance one part of the notebook will be faulty (and RMA won’t fix it of course, you’ll just waste your time and money on shipping).
- Replacement parts are (at least) 2 times more expensive on notebooks than on desktop, since the market is smaller and universal standards are pretty rare. Be ready for 1 or 2 months delay, since you’ll have to buy your parts abroad, on not-so-serious unknown websites.
- chip manufacturers original drivers are extremely hard to find, you’ll have to dig through forums and websites to get the exact reference number of that part, to later find the original driver on a korean-only website. This is frequently necessary with buggy drivers or when upgrading your OS (moving to Win7, or 32bit-to-64bit).
- drivers for the graphic cards are rarely optimized after the first 3 months following the product release, don’t expect massive framerate gains after an update. Smaller market = smaller driver team/work time.
…
“Details at the end of the comment” regarding the nVidia faulty GPUs (and how they reacted to their own failure) :
First : http://nvidiasettlement.com/
Because nVidia was going to lose the class-action lawsuits in the US, they negotiated a time-limited settlement with US customers. This way, most of the protesting users, aware of the faulty chip, would get their replacement notebook (and won’t have the possibility to sue nVidia after receiving it). The others, “common people”, will have to deal-with-it.
And since European customers don’t have the equivalent to the US class-action lawsuit, even locally in their own respective state, nVidia did NOTHING for the Rest Of The World.
Some notebook brands (you know, Asus, MSI, Acer) released a BIOS update forcing the fan to run at max speed, to reduce the risk of having a dead GPU chip in the 2-years warranty. Of course, the fan-based cooling system will break earlier, but that’s ok since it will happen after the warranty and you can say the fan was damaged overtime by the user.
A friend of mine found a solution : he talked with the Support guy (from a private company working for Dell in this area), and that guy accepted to give him a spare Dell GPU (cost the guy nothing, it’s all Dell cost) so he won’t have to come back again.
For a short period, Dell removed all nVidia mobile GPU from their notebooks and chose ATI GPUs. A few weeks later, nVidia came back all of a sudden (without showing any sign of having improved anything regarding quality control and support services) – thanks to cheaper deals and/or some under-the-table negociations.
Fun fact: nVidia later boasted about their sales number not being affected by this fiasco, since people buying notebook are a minority and rarely know what GPU they’re buying. They were clearly saying “we failed so hard this time, yet people are so dumb they still buy our stuff lol”.
Such thing could happen so easily because it’s the notebook market : gamers know nothing since there’s tons of different GPU models and it’s really hard to get benchmarks + they’re a minority.
=> So don’t expect anything but contempt from manufacturers.
05/10/2011 at 00:14 El_Emmental says:
(epic failed at posting, sorry)
05/10/2011 at 00:16 El_Emmental says:
edit: apparently, it was just lag, I feel dumb now :s
(original post: aw damn, I can’t post anything, what is the characters limit ?)
05/10/2011 at 00:41 Yerk Toader says:
I recently ordered the Asus 17″ G74SX-A1(with free upgrade to 14GB RAM). I would have preferred the specs of the MSI GT780DXR, but it wasn’t available at the time I was ordering. I’m in Afghanistan and need to start studying and have an outlet for the stress.
I would be perfectly fine with the step down in video card from the nVidia GTX 570 to 560, but there are several other issues I have with this machine.
These are all things I knew when I purchased the machine, but they still bother me:
The G74 lacks RAID unlike the MSI.
It also lacks a Num Lock key. Num Lock is now “Home” and launches Calc.exe.
The speakers are much louder on the MSI. I read a review where a user claimed that Asus’s software package can boost the volume, but I’ve yet to play around with that as I’m busy working 12 hour shifts.
The key lights are configurable out of the box on the MSI, to include solid colors, rows of colors, WASD highlighting and changing colors. On the Asus, you can change to a single set of designated colors and another for the WASD….If you pay for it, and it adds a significant amount to the build time according to the vendor I used to purchase the system.
And now to the troubles I’ve been having.
The keyboard is still having issues with tracking keystrokes on certain keys like page down. Some have said that this isn’t the case and the G74 build has corrected this issue, but not for me.
The thumbpad can be configured to disable when typing is detected, and a maximum timer of five seconds set till re-enabling. It can also be set to disable when a USB mouse is detected. Both work for varying amounts of time before they cease to function correctly. Even if I unplug and plug the mouse back in, the system fails to detect the mouse properly with respect to disabling the thumbpad. If I disable those features and re-enable them, they work again for anywhere from as little as ten minutes to several hours but have ceased functioning every time.
The mouse cursor inexplicably starts jumping in random directions, often along the X or Y axis, though also in random directions. Disabling the thumbpad and unplugging/plugging the mouse does nothing to correct this. It seems to be lasting about five to ten minutes at the least, and I don’t think it’s occurred longer than 20 minutes.
I purchased Win7 Ultimate to avoid the Asus baseline and had GenTech PC do the installation for me. The Asus software is present, and some of it is useful and some not. I’m not sure it bogs down the system, but that’s hard to determine. However, I had my nephew install it again on the second drive. For some reason the system appears to be acting as if one of the installations was for a server, something I think is not possible with Win7(please correct me if I am wrong). Choosing the first instance of Windows at the bootloader prompt should take you to the first drive’s installation. However, it takes you to what appears to be the second drive’s installation and Windows shows the applications installed at D:\. The second instance boots to what appears to be the first drive, and this instance shows the applications installed at C:\. This may be the fault of Windows or the individuals who performed the installs but I’m not sure.
I installed iTunes on the second drive and removed Quick Time, only to discover it is now “required” for iTunes to work. I reinstalled the QuickTime package so I could manage my iPod. Directly after performing the install, typing on this instance of Windows became severely sluggish. Not sure if this was related to Quick Time, but last I checked the problem was ongoing. Resource consumption appeared to be normal.
After I noticed the typing issue, I rebooted to check and see if it continued. The system locked on the Asus logo in the POST for several minutes and I rebooted to find the same problem. Three other reboots returned the same result. I decided to unplug the power cord and try again. For no explicable reason I know of, this corrected the issue and I’ve not seen it again since.
I have had a great deal of trouble with Steam in the Afghani environment, but it may be due to our degraded commercial network with high latency and steady packet loss. The software will frequently crash and searching the internet turns up a number of people having issues with Steam on Win7/64bit. The problem seems to happen upon sign in and game launch in particular, but I was able to go to a large base yesterday and use a beefier/reliable network. The software appeared to function with little trouble, but I did not get long to test the issue.
Bioshock will run at max res, but there are visual artifacts and game seems a little glitchy. Same for Bad Company 2.
Before anyone jumps my shit, I’m in Afghanistan on a military base and my wife is disabled. I’ve got to take care of a lot from out here regarding her physical and mental health, work 12 hours, try to get certs and work out. Also, as my job is troubleshooting computers, I really don’t want to bring that to my own computer – I’m not interested in Apple’s overpriced walled garden, I just want my damn system to work.
Now as far as I know, the drivers are all up to date. I asked my nephew to update everything prior to sending it to me, and Asus Live Update does not indicate any new drivers. I have mostly freeware and open source applications like Libre Office and VLC, a couple of DAWs like Reason 5 and Steam. There are the systems drivers, one for my phone’s bluetooth, for an X-Box controller, for my external HD and for my M-Audio USB MIDI keyboard. I don’t consider this a whole lot of stuff, but I know some folks think that Windows installs should have a bare minimum of software and drivers in order to ensure functionality. I can’t imagine my loadout being too much for an 1800 laptop.
Anyway… when I get the time to troubleshoot, if I can get this baby dialed in I’m sure I will love everything but the lack of RAID. For now, Son…I am disappoint.
05/10/2011 at 00:43 Wallllrod says:
I’ve got an Acer aspire 5739G (2.13 dual core, GT240M) that just about handles more demanding new games, though i’ve not bothered trying Battlefield 3, since BFBC2 wasn’t so hot on it. I’ve had a couple of overheating problems, but a can of air and a little fan platform have solved that. Again, i’ve only really got it because lugging a desktop around is too much hassle for uni. I wish the people that stroll in to tell us how stupid we all are for not getting desktops would read the posts with reasons WHY we need laptops.
05/10/2011 at 02:28 TheGoddamn says:
I’m also using a 14-inch TimelineX from Acer as my primary PC gaming device. It’s been able to run modern games pretty damn well, and that’s with an i5-460m and a Radeon Mobility 5650. Put in eight gigs of G.Skill RAM just because it came with two gigs, so I thought, what the hey.
Only thing holding it back is the 640GB 5400 RPM hard drive, but that, coupled with switchable graphics and eight-hour battery life, enables me to turn it into a lightweight writing/browsing device and into a full-fledged DX11 rig with just a few clicks. I’ve put it through its paces with games like Bulletstorm, Civ V, Just Cause 2, The Force Unleashed 2 (what an end-game chugfest that was).
PS. It’s a blast connecting it to a TV with an HDMI cable, hooking up my wireless Xbox controller (sadly, with a dongle) and playing on a couch. Thinnest 360 I’ve ever seen.
05/10/2011 at 06:45 jrodman says:
I game on MacBook Pro.
Given the reliability I have experienced, I would not recommend it. It seems like the performance would be fine under Boot Camp (Windows) but I haven’t made the plunge to install that yet.
My employer owns the MacBook, so economically it is a bargain for me. I would not recommend it for gaming as a purchase.
05/10/2011 at 07:12 Squiddity says:
I’ve got an Asus G74SX, the Best Buy model. It’s a really, really awesome laptop and I love almost everything about it. It even runs Thief and System Shock 2–not even my desktop will do that.
It never gets hot, which is super, and the numpad is radical.
The battery life’s short–it only lasts around three to four hours if I minimize stuff that would cause battery usage–so I’ll try to get the Asus Transformer 2 and a dock so I can have a machine that’s easier to do word processing on. I’m never in a place where I don’t have a socket to plug it in to, so it’s not really an issue.
I do have two major complaints: I can’t find a backpack to store it in.
…aaaand: the mouse pad SUCKS. It’s neat and all, but when I have the laptop set to shut the trackpad off so I can use my mouse, it switches back on at random, which is super annoying. It also turns on while I’m typing, even though it’s supposed to shut off then too. :\
05/10/2011 at 07:46 Wooly Wugga Wugga says:
And now the posts appear.
05/10/2011 at 08:14 Wooly Wugga Wugga says:
Bloody spam filter. Would somebody please fix it? At least half my posts are just vanishing.
Anyway. I’m a bit po’ so mine is a bit of a budget solution.
I have a 1201n with the dual core Atom, 2 Gig of RAM, 12.1 inch 1366*768 screen and the nVidia Ion chipset. I use it mainly for some minor development (It actually handles Visual Studio 2010 in a manner that is surprisingly unfrustrating if a little sluggish.), as an HD media centre in the living room and web browsing.
It also handles games surprisingly well considering my tastes. Bloodbowl runs smoothly enough on low detail settings, Civ IV runs nicely although turns get sluggish on the bigger maps and Rome : Total War runs like silk. All this at the native resolution. Basically 5 year old games are playable.
My one gripe is that the hard drive is glacial but I can’t justify spending half the mount I spent on the laptop on an SSD drive.
05/10/2011 at 08:15 Wooly Wugga Wugga says:
Duplicate post because of the original going missing.
05/10/2011 at 08:32 MSJ says:
Asus A43S:
Intel i5 (quad core)
4GB DDR3 RAM
Geforce GT 540M with 2GB VRAM
The GT 540M is a pretty good cheap GPU. Runs most games at high excellently even if you use DX10 and anti-aliasing.
05/10/2011 at 08:48 Corrupt_Tiki says:
It’s too heavy, it has no battery, and it gets hotter than the core of the sun.
Thus I stick to desktops for gaming.
05/10/2011 at 10:29 Snegletiss says:
I had a Zepto once. It had a really good graphique card for the time being. (Nvidia 9600GT M, dual processor 2.81Ghz and 4 gigs of RAM). This was at the time when Nvidia 200GTX-series had just been announced. (Do not remember the year) It was excellent for about a year, and it just got horrible all of the sudden. All that overheating from the gaming, I’d say was one of the primary sources of why it got so bad. Then after that the fan got broke, and started making weird noises whenever I lifted the laptop up. I sent it into to repair, and a week after I sent it in, Zepto company were bankrupt. Luckily they repaired, even for free. Even though it didn’t help speed the laptop up again.
All games ran smoothly on the laptop, and I loved it. It was easy to just go over to a friend and to LAN’s and start playing. It was a good periode, but I’m not quite sure if it was worth the price. Costed about 550 british pounds.
I hoping that laptops will last longer, and that they won’t get that extreme heat. Then I’ll probably buy a new gaming laptop, but for now I’m sticking with desktop computers.
05/10/2011 at 11:42 oldblivion says:
Got myself a beefy Clevo P151HM1 about 3 months ago
It has been a dream computer for me so far, enough grunt to play any game i want prettily, can be used on a lap, and can word process for about 3.5 hours off the charger. My only complaint is the quality of the plastic used to make the case, as it is rubbing off to a shiny polish.
For specs:
Its running an i7- 2630QM at 2GHz
Nvidia 460M
8 Gb of RAM running at 1333MHz
Seagate Momentus XT 500Gb HHD with 4Gb of Solid State Storage
Intel 6300 Wifi card
05/10/2011 at 18:06 propjoe says:
I’ve got an eight-year-old Lenovo laptop, I don’t even know the specs. I keep Windows XP running on it so I can play anything that doesn’t work with WIndows 7 but is too recent for DosBox. So far that’s been just Max Payne and a handful of others, but it’s good to have a backup. I also load up lightweight, casual games for traveling.